The Enigma Trilogy Is a Terrifying, Timely Horror Saga for the ChatGPT Era

Mothered, the earliest installment in the series’ timeline, set before the events of The Enigma Machine, centers on Liana, a young girl who is driven home from the hospital by her father after a life-saving operation. It’s not long before she (and the player) realize something is amiss, as Liana is greeted the next morning by a Tara the Android-like mannequin claiming to be her mother. Over the course of a week, Liana experiences a bizarre (and frankly, abusive) series of encounters as her so-called “mother” attempts to help her recover. From apple-picking in the family orchard to scarfing down plates of “nutrients” (your favorite meal), Liana must ascertain the truth of her situation and “condition” before… Well, before something terrible happens. 

While technically the series’ first entry, 2017’s The Enigma Machine was retroactively made the second chronological installment following Mothered’s release. Set in 2055, players assume the role of an engineer tasked to undergo a training exercise inside Dreamscape, an immersive virtual reality program created by the Enigma Corporation to prepare you to debug rogue androids. The game, as with much of if not all of the entire series, is indebted to the influence of Hideo Kojima in the form of its fourth-wall breaking storytelling a la Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. As players traverse the artificial landscapes of Dreamscape with the aid of a chipper instruction program known as “demOS,” they soon realize that this supposed “training simulation” is much more than either the player or the program were led to believe.

Echostasis, the as-of-now final installment in the Enigma series, thrusts players into the role of the Administrator for the Enigma Corporation’s R&D division, who awakens to find that the company’s “Echo” virtual reality system (based on the codebase of the now-illegal Dreamscape) is being assailed by a virus that has corrupted the system’s governing A.I., “Her.” In order to rebuff the attack, the player must disentangle the dreamscapes of three test subjects in their quest to root out and ultimately exterminate the virus. Without spoiling too much, the story only becomes more cerebral from there on out, featuring callbacks to all the previous installments of the series while telling its own unique story on the stultifying and emotionally isolating impacts of modern technology. Echostasis is a first-person, time-loop horror shooter with hypertext storytelling set in a nightmarish vaporwave hell-future. In short, it’s awesome.

We’re living in a world where some 38% of the webpages that existed a decade ago are now no longer accessible, where text-to-speech generative A.I. threatens to splinter any and all consensus of what “reality” is online, and where social media algorithms cocoon their users in walled gardens of selective truth and information at the expense of mass societal estrangement. If ever there was a series of games that spoke directly to the technological anxieties and fears of our present, it’s Jamie Gavin’s Enigma pentalogy. Breath deep, dive into the abyss of an algorithm-governed future, and brave the horrors therein to preserve your own humanity.

Toussaint Egan is a culturally omnivorous writer and editor with over a decade of experience writing about games, animation, movies, and more. You can find him on Bluesky.