SiN Episodes: Emergence is a 2006 First-Person Shooter developed by Ritual Entertainment. It's the fourth installment of the SiN franchise and is the canonical follow-up to the Wages of Sin Expansion Pack.
It stars Colonel John Blade and his Mission Control J.C. Armack once more, however they're joined by newcomer Jessica Cannon, a rookie in HardCorps who's been assigned to rescue Blade after a mission gone wrong led him to being strapped into Elexis Sinclaire's laboratories. Elexis herself isn't alone this time, as she's joined by mafia boss Radek, who wants to use Elexis's discoveries for his own good.
The game was developed using Valve Software's Source engine, even reusing code from Half-Life 2. However, this has a justification: at the same time Episodes (the first out of 9 planned episodes) was developed, Ritual Entertainment was developing an Expansion Pack for Quake IV called Awakening. However, said pack was aborted after the commercial failure of the game, leading this game to have a shorter budget and Ritual being sold to MumboJumbo, who put them to work with "casual games". As a result, the remaining eight episodes were scrapped.
This game shows examples of:
- Achilles' Heel: On the backs of smaller mutants, although this is a substitute for making head shots on normal mooks.
- Cherry Tapping: You can kill SinTEK troops by pistol-whipping them in the face.
- Credits Gag: Several characters appear at the end of the credits in order to deliver some goofy lines. These include Jessica, a hobo, a citizen, a SinTEK worker and Radek himself.
- Downer Beginning: Blade starts the game captured by Elexis and at his mercy as she inject him with a drug to turn him into a mutant.
- Drought Level of Doom: The construction site shootout has you going up against several dozen goons, including Elite Mooks, with no healing items anywhere to be found, and for some reason the goons don't drop healing items when killed like they usually do.
- Dual Boss: The finale pairs the land-based mutant you fought earlier with an helicopter.
- Dynamic Difficulty: The Personal Challenge System is designed to adapt itself to the player's skill level and varies the numbers and toughness of enemies faced in accordance with the player's performance.
- Easter Egg: There are multiple secrets involving the Dopefish from Commander Keen.
- Emergency Weapon: There's a quick melee button. Enemies likewise use a melee attack, such as headbutting the player.
- Enemy Chatter: The SinTEK troops will call out orders to each other as you engage them, and will noticeably freak out (to the point of calling in reports that they're taking heavy casualties) when you kill many of them.
- Evil Tower of Ominousness: The SinTEK tower, which Jessica says looks down upon the city. It is first visible when you manage to escape the pit, and if you are at the position where you see explosions from the U4 Lab (and no-clip outside), you can see said tower to the right. Compare this visibility to the chapter where you enter the U4 Lab, where the SinTEK tower isn't visible. As everything is practically in walking distance, it would appear as if the tower underwent Ridiculously Fast Construction during the time Blade was underground.
- Foreshadowing: While it's only known due to the former QA Manager Michael Russell stream, Elexis was supposed to have split up into 4 different versions of herself, which is why Hologram Elexis says she's meeting Blade for the first time in a long time, the Elexis in the intro was supposed to be a different Elexis.
- Gameplay Ally Immortality: Jessica is fully invincible to enemy fire and cannot die.
- Game-Breaking Bug: The game shipped with a rather nefarious bug with the dynamic difficulty feature. There are hidden triggers, scattered throughout the game, that tweak the difficulty based on, among other things, how much time it takes the player to progress through them. Two such triggers were accidentally created such that they would not disappear after being hit, meaning players who lingered around them would be unknowingly triggering them multiple times per second, causing the difficulty to skyrocket to
Nintendo Hard and beyond, quite possibly to the point of being Unwinnable. - In-Vehicle Invulnerability: There's a section where you take fire while in a car. You can lean out to attack, but there's no purpose to make yourself vulnerable to return attacks (aside from having to leave the vehicle to open a gate.)
- Left Hanging: Due to its nature, there were more episodes planned after this one, however, the Episodes saga ended after this game, leaving Jessica Cannon's fate unclear, not to mention several hinted at plot threads:
- What Jessica's past with Radek was, where she seems to hold a hatred of him but he doesn't know her.
- The fact Elexis was split into multiple individual personalities is still slightly hinted at but never followed up on, even the QA Manager livestream doesn't say who the last fourth version of Elexis was other than that it would have been a surprise.
- Why Radek wants Blade dead so badly.
- Luck-Based Mission: The game's adaptive difficulty feature causes a lot of this if you raise the initial difficulty/decrease the assistance levels from the defaults, particularly in the last few levels, where enemy spawns can be regular goons or Elite Mooks completely at random though at least you can manipulate it by dying and loading a save before the enemies spawned to lower the adaptive difficulty.
- Male Gaze: The opening sequence give us a first person view of Elexis's generous chest from below.
- Missing Secret: There are additional Radio Calls for Jessica/JC when the player looks at certain environmental objects, however a large chunk of them (particularly in SinTEK Tower) either don't play it all or bring up the radio call prompt, only for no dialogue to ensue once the player presses it. (Such as the findable files of Jessica or Blade's mother.)
- Recycled Animation: One of the ways the game saved on production budget was to reuse code base and even assets like animations and entity code from Half-Life 2, as can be seen in things like the rifle butt used by enemy soldiers, and the mutants' ability to whack physics objects at you.
- Remember the New Guy?: Radek is a new character but acts like he has a long standing hatred of Blade, presumably why he's so pissed at Blade would have been revealed in later episodes.
- Sexy Surfacing Shot: The game has a gratuitous fanservice moment of this early on, when Blade has a hallucination of Elexis in a lake, and she slowly surfaces from the water in a Barely-There Swimwear while Shaking the Rump.
- Theme Song Reveal: Variants of the main characters' themes will play shortly before they appear.
- Vengeful Vending Machine: Vending Machines will eventually release 2 health items if the player keeps interacting with them, further using them will result in live grenades being dumped out instead.
- What the Hell, Player?: Staring at Jessica's... assets will cause her to chastise Blade/the player for ogling.
