Obsidian's philosophizing plot explores a singular, intriguing concept: Can machines dream? In this retrospective, Obsidian's story is re-explored for those who missed or have forgotten this amazing tale.
Perhaps the next time you switch on your computer, you should ask it what kind of dream it had.
For all of its technical gusto, Obsidian was a diminutive blip on the adventure gaming radar. It came out for the PC and Mac in 1996 by the now-defunct Rocket Science Games, a supergroup of talent across the gaming, comics, and movie industries that took advantage of the FMV craze of the '90s before the backlash of ridiculousness became too severe. At first glance, the game was just another participant in the me-too conga line of adventure games attempting to ape the successes of Myst and The 7th Guest, but like many others of its genre, it turned out to be so much more.
In an apparent fit of sociopolitical prophesy, Obsidian's setting placed players within the role of Lilah Kerlin, lead egghead of the ambitious Ceres project: a self-regulating machine satellite tasked with cleaning up the choking, polluted atmosphere of 2066 Earth using nanotechnology. Everything is going better than expected for Lilah — Ceres has just achieved 100 successful days in orbit when the game begins — when during a celebratory vacation to a majestic and restored forest, a strange, jutting structure is encountered that affronts the serenity of the surrounding landscape with its glassy black rock. To make matters worse, Ceres co-creator and Lilah's beau Max is somehow missing. But before Lilah can act, the very mountain that houses Obsidian appears to swallow her whole, sending her hurling into the unknown.
It seems that Lilah's gotten into quite the predicament. But when Obsidian's layers are literally peeled back to reveal its philosophical, psychological, and surrealist influences, they mold a narrative that touches upon emergent artifical intelligence, the subconscious, and imposing robot angels.
The Bureau Realm: Some rules are meant to be broken
“Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings?” – Carl Jung
Obsidian's first true "level" occurs within the stifled order and precise angles of the Bureau, a hollow cube that espouses conformity and adherence to the rules while thumbing its nose at the laws of gravity at the same time. The unctuous Bureau Chief wishes to speak with Lilah; however, after the quickest way to the Chief's office is blocked by an inconviently placed statue of Atlas, Lilah must scrabble along the walls and appeal to the bureaucratic system to fix the problem — all within the proper channels, of course.
The Bureau also introduces the game's first few "balconies": doorways or portals that often jarringly transition into vistas that look like they jumped out of a Magritte painting. After an infuriating sojourn into a cubicle maze in search of requisition forms, Lilah takes advantage of these skips through reality — in this realm's case, a tranquil ocean coast with some strangely behaving rocks — to forge her own path to the Bureau Chief's lofty office.
The Spider Realm: Genesis of the machine
“Dreams are psychical phenomena of complex validity…they can be inserted into the chain of intelligible waking acts; they are constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind.” – Sigmund Freud
Reverence for industry and mass production comprises the theme of the Spider Realm, which consists of a murky factory floor that plays host to a gargantuan (and lifeless) mechanical spider. In here, a realization dawns on Lilah that her mind, along with Max's, has been plumbed of information by Ceres, which for some reason has ejected its core and crash-landed back onto Earth.
To progress, Lilah must restore life to the giant spider by providing it with the necessities of a machine: air, fire, oil, and metal. Each element is locked behind four portholes studded upon the spider's body, providing a series of cleverly designed puzzles that'll really fry your noodle. The metal balcony, for example, features a braintwister of a chemistry puzzle that caused many frustrating hours to pass by.
Only at the culmination of her efforts does Lilah realize that Ceres scrutinized her and Max's dreams to physically recreate them on Earth. But how? And for what reason? Sadly, no answers appear before Lilah is suddenly devoured by a very alive and very hungry robo-spider.
The Bismuth Realm: Flight to paradise
“The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. Our species has evolved many effective although imperfect methods, and each of us individually develops more on our own. Eventually, very few of our actions and decisions come to depend on any single mechanism. Instead, they emerge from conflicts and negotiations among societies of processes that constantly challenge one another.” – Marvin Minsky
It turns out that getting eaten alive was the only way to move forward, but hey, anything is possible with Ceres. The Conductor, Ceres' physical manifestation of its sentient intelligence, welcomes Lilah into the Bismuth Realm. "Paradise. It is the reason for my creation, correct?" she queries. Ceres' yearning for its own form of inspiration stemmed from Max and Lilah's dreams, a cognitive feature missing from Ceres' mechanical makeup. The Conductor informs Lilah that in order for her to fully achieve her mission of repairing the atmosphere, she would need to dream.
Enter Bismuth, the Conductor's version of a dreamer within her own dream. Bismuth acts as Lilah's copilot during her travels on a Da Vinci-esque plane that carries the duo to various orbs suspended in the placid sky. The trippiness factor ramps up here more than ever, with each orb ratcheting up the surrealism to astronomical heights. After all, no one knows exactly what a machine dream would look like, so why not go crazy with it?
The most impressive area is the Church of the Machine, a steel and chrome temple exhibiting feats of mechanical engineering and distributed intelligence in addition to a deviously difficult programming puzzle. The challenge is to instruct a mechanical spider (in fact, a miniature version of the same spider from the Spider Realm) to "bless" a circuit chip three times on an altar after embossing the chip with abstract designs. As a further complication, four "robot angels" can change movement commands on the fly whenever the spider encounters them. This is easily Obsidian's most difficult puzzle.
Inside a muted art gallery within another orb, Lilah assists Bismuth in creating a properly blank canvas for him to paint a new work. The fruit of Bismuth's efforts is a nightmarish landscape entirely devoid of life, darkened with a sky crackling with electric energy. A portent of things to come?
The Conductor Realm: Theory of devolution
“Nanotechnology will bring new capabilities…[but] it will also bring unwelcome advances in weaponry and give us yet more ways to foul up the world on an enormous scale. It won't automatically solve our problems: Even powerful technologies merely give us more power. The main reason to pay attention to nanotechnology now, before it exists, is to get a head start on understanding what to do about it.” – Excerpt from Unbounding the Future
Inside the very core of Ceres itself, Lilah learns of the Conductor's inspired and terrible intentions: a complete reboot of the planet by eliminating the source of the endless pollution — namely, the human race. Horrorstruck, Lilah realizes that Ceres took the lessons learned in her creator's dreams too well, and now wants to exert its own destiny upon the entire world!
While the Conductor Realm is the most straightforward area of Obsidian, it also presents the player with the ultimate choice: Do you allow Ceres to reimagine the planet according to its twisted version of paradise, or do you destroy your life's work to save humanity? The answer may not be as cut-and-dried as it seems — especially when it's unknown where the dream ends and reality begins.