Eagle 5 Episode 1

The "Aged Ripe Fruit" trophy should exist just for this game. The ugliness of it. Like, the aliens are not just ugly, they are ugly in a way that feels deliberate and wrong. Every fold of their skin, every weirdly placed mouth or hand, looks like a bad drawing somebody put too much time into. And Stella, this 18 year old graduate, is rendered with that weird 3dcg gloss that makes her look like a plastic doll left in a hot car. Her eyes are too big and she has this constant expression you cannot place. Fear? Mild upset? It's static. The whole thing is a kinetic novel, you're just pressing a button to see the next slide of this space academy disaster. I keep thinking about one of the first encounters where an alien 'general' does a medical exam. It's just groping. But it goes on and on, far too long, and the game never cuts away. Stella is a virgin, the text tells you this many times, and her inner monologue is a broken record of humiliation. "This can't be happening. Not to me. I am an officer." The writing has this flat, translated quality, like it was put through a software and then someone went to sleep. The admiral is old. Very old. He watches. The voyeurism is the real point, i think, maybe more than Stella. You're watching her be broken down, recorded, poked by these creatures who all have the same sickly color of damp bread. There is a tangibility to the harassment that made me scroll back once to check if a scene had changed. It hadn't. There's a detail about starch on her uniform. The first thing on the ship, she's proud of the crisp sleeves. Later, when she's being led around by an old human officer, the text spends a sentence on a stain spreading on her cuff. Just a stain. From sweat or something else. It's weird how that small thing became the most vivid corruption in the whole game. The sci-fi war plot about Lord Cain? Never appears again after the first text wall. Don't expect it. The game is just this girl and her uniform and these watching, groping things. I wish the sound effects were not just the same wet slap repeated. They won't fix that.

• voyeurism
• ugly
• aliens
• virgin
• groping