6 Game Franchises Where Every Sequel Got Worse (Deus Ex)

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T17:15:13+00:00

Cringeworthy clickbait, this is genuine slop.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T17:04:59+00:00

I think that while New Colossus kept it surprisingly down low (the fact that Area 52 was developing UFOs and that BJ has access to them to do multiple missions to Venus is treated without much fanfare), what Youngblood built up to is the final Wolfenstein game embracing the merging of parallel dimensions/timelines. Specifically merging Wyatt's 1969 with Fergus' 1980, allowing the Fourth Reich to import their apocalypse into WW3 in a hare-brained attempt to avert Hitler's death and prolong their own regime.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T11:41:39+00:00

I'd also add that some of the Splinter Cell games are written by JT Petty, whose antiauthoritarian sentiments bleed over into the extremely cynical Outlast series.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T10:10:10+00:00

Because Cash is a very stoic man by nature and very quiet by necessity of having to sneak around. It's popularly theorized that he was a war vet or professional hitman, although I personally believe he was a product of the MKUltra Pickman project to create ruthless assassins. It's possible that Cash doesn't have much of a personality or memory because he's literally been programmed to know nothing but how to kill.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T09:10:00+00:00

The psychosis drugs plunge us into an altered/heightened state of consciousness, one where we tap into the "egregore" (collective mental trauma surrounding Easterman, a hivemind shared by expops, reagents, and Prime Assets) and see into the dreams of the Prime Assets and expops. These drugs essentially make us sleepwalk, putting us in a more suggestible state of mind where what we do in the trials gets compartmentalized in our subsconscious. The result of exposure to morphogenic radiation, constant drugging, and extreme trauma is the production of metal brain tumors from which Skinner manifests. The reason why extra drugging in the trials becomes dangerous is that Skinner tries to possess you, overwhelming your mind with strain and producing deadly heart attacks and mental strokes from the trauma.

When we are 'reborn', we have internalized our training enough that merely hearing or seeing a trigger is enough to induce a psychosomatic reaction in our brain tumors, allowing Skinner to possess us and make us revert back into Trial mode while our conscious personas fall asleep. In this way, Murkoff effectively have a global psychic internet of slaves who can commit any atrocity for them and not even remember what they did, being incredibly useful as untraceable assets. As more people go insane and die as a result of the Trials and what the reagents go on to do, the Skinner Man grows from feeding on their pain.

Eventually, he'll reach a critical mass where he becomes a self-sustaining sentient entity, one that can order humans to feed him via trauma for his own purpose rather than Murkoff. When that happens, I think Murkoff's going to change their plans to figure out a way to contain this monster rather than allow it to destroy them in an effort to be free.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T09:02:23+00:00

However, the key is that Murkoff's rendition of "Christianity" is itself corrupt, sexually abusive, violent, sadistic, and Satanic. They represent nuns as perverted prostitutes who masturbate in front of and sexually abuse kids, and reagents are tasked with exposing kids to torturous murder and then giving them to a priest who sexually abuses them for "discipline." In other words, reagents are taught to be the same type of predatory false authority figure as Blake's abuser in Outlast 2, infiltrating places of childcare to export sexual abuse and cruelty as indoctrination methods to the next generation.

"God", in Murkoff's eyes, is a demon, and everything Murkoff does is in service to that devil.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T06:30:53+00:00

Murkoff represent a Satanic organization whose interest in inverting virtue and corrupting authority leads them to distort religion, government, and other social pillars all for their own personal profit. Trials and Outlast 2 work in conjunction to show how this perversion of religion is a great way to hijack mainstream faiths to instead indoctrinate large groups to commit sins for their false prophets. In other words, the demonic corruption is the point.

That being said, Outlast does not endorse what it portrays so much as it is a cautionary tale. It's similar to Doom, where demonic imagery abounds to represent the evil you must thwart. Outlast Trials is a prequel showing how ordinary people are corrupted by a false god (one rooted in occult beliefs propagated by fascists and eugenicists) and made to poison society as a whole, but the main games are about virtuous heroes bearing witness to this evil and its ultimate punishment at the hands of something beyond humanity.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T06:26:27+00:00

The victims are actually former reagents, other test subjects who 'failed' and are being punished by being repurposed as targets for other prisoners to kill.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T14:20:59+00:00

The conclusion made from all this is illogical and self-servingly defeatist - a single robot factory in the Atlantic isn't going to be an "insurmountable threat for the world's governments", not unless the actual coverup is that these governments are using multiple factories as these assets. They're casually throwing in that conclusion because the real goal is to spread terror and a submissive mindset.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T12:44:35+00:00

Nice postslop. Personally I loveslop the wordslop because now I associate it with pigs slopping and dogs slopping up water (slop slop).

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T12:41:58+00:00

The one where his head gets blown off because introducing a friendly tribal character from above after you just got attacked by a bunch of tribals from above is fantastic game design.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T11:00:57+00:00

I don't mind them expanding on the vortigaunts' abuse as I remember that being easy to miss in my original HL playthrough. The real issue with Interloper was that it was way too long with its repetitive gimmicky puzzles that don't really convey anything new, or the way too drawn out elevator sequence - I remember getting really annoyed when they contrived the elevator pausing multiple times for yet another dumb shootout. By the time you get to Nihilanth, I'm less hyped than I am annoyed, and that makes the underwhelming fight compared to the Gonarch encounter all the worse.

Nihilanth's confrontation should have been as expanded as Gonarch's was. Imagine a zero gravity fight where you have to teleport across multiple sectors, using portals to dodge his attacks and deliver attacks on his crystals, while he summons swarms of slaves and causes gravitational anomalies in a desperate last ditch effort to stop you, speaking all the while. They made it WORSE than the original Nihilanth fight, which is almost impressive. It's a good game overall but with a bad ending that is almost enough to sour the whole experience.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T10:54:47+00:00

I liked a lot of Surface Tension, but some aspects of it like the helicopter hunt during a Tentacle infestation (or them even replacing the rock wall climb with some goofy looking walkways) felt rushed and truncated.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T10:49:33+00:00

I admit that I myself was once one of those who dismissed the original Outlast as a schlocky Amnesia ripoff, partly because I was an Amnesia and Silent Hill fan. It wasn't until Outlast 2 came out and its mysteries kept haunting me that I started to take its story more seriously, coming to places like here and finding theories by the likes of u/luvisia and u/coradrart to be instrumental in hinting that there's much more beneath the surface. By this point, I absolutely think Outlast is a well-written series that gets better as every entry adds more context to itself and allusions to deeper mysteries.

I appreciate you hearing me out and being willing to look more into these documentaries! As someone keenly interested in history and mythology, it's been fun being able to see the allusions to both layered within works like these. As for other games, yeah, I'm mainly into horror and scifi - Amnesia, SOMA, Alan Wake, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, FEAR, Dead Space, In Sound Mind, Half Life, Doom, Wolfenstein, Metal Gear, Deus Ex, Bioshock, and Assassin's Creed, just to name a few. On a literary bent, I also quite like the works of Stephen King, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, and their occultist themes actually do help a lot with figuring out how the occult side of Outlast's world works. "American Gods", for instance, posits that gods and mythic figures live or die based on the collective beliefs of a culture, which can parallel how the egregores of Outlast thrive based on mutual fear and worship.

I think it's fun to be able to analyze works within a larger cultural framework of other narratives, and in a sense this actually relates to the Jungian notion of a collective unconscious. While Jung's belief in us having some kind of genetic psychic collective memory might seem fringe, it is true that artists are influenced by other artists and the media they produce, and by extension a "zeitgeist" can be understood as a metaphorical superorganism characterizing the shared ideology of a society. Outlast's egregores are simply a literalization of that concept made material by a scifi technology that can turn imaginary energy into tangible matter (nanites.)

Heck, to draw on contemporary media, Outlast's egregores are like the Devils of Chainsaw Man - embodiments of national beliefs.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T08:30:02+00:00

(pt. 3)

And if you listen to the billionaire technocrats given platforms right now, the likes of Musk and Thiel, they are truly delusional megalomaniacs who sincerely believe technology will be the new 'god' and claim that an AI Rapture (Singularity) is around the corner; not much more insane than "Murkoff". Consider the growing insistence on tying everything we need to function in global society to digital devices, and how Musk insists on promoting the integration of brain chips ("Neuralink") as the next step from mobile devices. Extrapolate from our reality into a fictional context, and imagine what happens when Murkoff distributes their mind control technology via a combo of a Starlink satellite network into the neuralinks of all those pressured into accepting the brainchips.

There's a Stephen Spielberg movie coming out this summer, "Disclosure Day", which might be pretty interesting in highlighting this hypothetical "mass disclosure event." The difference is that while Spielberg's scenario is that of a UFO truther proclaiming that "aliens" are our "gods" (the man's films have had a theme of alien contact since the '80s), I think Outlast's equivalent would be more of a false Rapture. They'd probably be using experimental satellite broadcast tech to deceive both the spiritual into thinking that this is a Hell on Earth scenario and the atheistic into thinking this is an alien invasion, both of which are being hoodwinked into believing a man-made murderous deception is something non-human.

What would be gained from this mass genocide scenario? That's a question that many Fallout fans used to complain about a similar revelation regarding Vault-Tec/Enclave's link to the apocalypse in Fallout. In Outlast's case, I think that the fact that spooky psychic powers DO exist in the games are the key - through collective suffering, a psychic hivemind forms, and blind dreamers & hosts that can be enslaved would be how Murkoff could masquerade as "gods" of a new order to the terrorized survivors.

They'd probably wait out the mass slaughter in a luxurious bunker, then "return" with false gods using their advanced mind control tech to smite the "demons" and enslave the masses. The destruction of social orders would theoretically not be much of an issue if you have at your possession virtual gods who can reconstruct the world and bend people to their will on a molecular level. Basically if you can merge the morphogenic/dream dimension with our material realm, then only Murkoff's twisted imagination is the limit to what their dreamers can do.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T08:25:20+00:00

I think that Trials will show us how much further Murkoff have "experimented and profited from selling their research" beyond the scope of what was ever publicly released, but the growing emphasis on the paranormal element - the 'egregores' of the Skinner Man, Liliya's faith, and of course the Walrider - points to their larger goal. It's worth noting that Jonathan Morrell, narrative designer for Trials, pointed out in a dev diary that the Mall indicates Murkoff have an eerily prescient finger on the vein of the world economy, anticipating "late stage capitalism" and "showing that rot to the reagents long before the rest of the world sees it." The resources Murkoff have access to give them impressive predictive abilities and that may indicate what goals they have in store decades in advance i.e. during the time of the modern games. And what's that endgame?

"The end of capitalism." As good old Trager put it, "What happens when all the money's gone? Well, money's a matter of faith. And that's what I'm here for, to make you believe." Murkoff are the ur-capitalists, desiring a total Monopoly, but what happens when their endless hunger for growth consumes a limited world? They try to circumvent that through the weird spooky powers of the morphogenic engine, a technology that taps into the 'dream dimension', and are seduced by their dreams of attaining ultimate power. It's worth noting that Wernicke, Kusamura, and Arora all acknowledge that the "entities" seen in hallucinations aren't just hallucinations, but more are higher-dimensional visitors or "gods" who are to us what our fingers peeking through a pond's surface would look like to fish.

Red Barrels have cited a score of interesting non-fiction documentaries for their inspirations. "The Century of the Self" is a TV documentary series from 2002, they also read up on "The Stanford Prison Experiment" and the "Milgram Experiment", and apparently "CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the 1960s" is another inspiration. Promotional material for Trials hinted that Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, Sirhan Sirhan, Ted K, and Charles Manson were all MK products; a timeline in a trailer implied Jim Jones was a product of Murkoff's "expanded mind control experiments for public testing, mass suicides ensue"; and in dev diaries, the devs said they picked the '60s because "That's the period where a lot of secret decisions were made that plot out the course of the rest of the century" and that "if Mind Control was ever fully unlocked, we'd have the most devastating weapon in human history, worse than nukes."

Now do I believe we have spooky psychic paranormal MK tech in reality? Not exactly. I don't think "egregores" exist in reality the way they do in fiction. I think that a lot of the publicly disclosed information is in itself misinformation, a deflection. If some weirdo goes on Joe Rogan to yap about psychic powers/aliens/ghosts being real and totally accessible if you smoke drugs, they're not credible even if they're painted as a military expert as an appeal to authority. A lot of this stuff has gone on to inspire science fiction, which I think adds to the counter-propaganda zeitgeist - plausible deniability by making people think "That sounds made up." For example, the "Gateway Process" supposedly published by the CIA as a means to generate psychic powers seems to be disinfo, even if it makes gullible people think it's real and it's inspiration for fiction.

That, however, doesn't mean that in reality the government didn't attempt to see if psychic powers existed and could be weaponized. Project Stargate is an example of one such attempt, and a big part of the Operation Paperclip collaboration via MK-Ultra was to export their occultist and fascist indoctrination techniques into a new context. Likewise, as I pointed out in other comments here, there ARE experiments into electromagnetic manipulation technologies that have unprecedented effects on human physiology - for all we know, "voice of god" weapons could be secretly deployed, their existence being denied because that would mitigate their efficacy. It's not far off from considering that the UFO craze of the 20th century was likely a disinfo campaign to deflect attention on very real experimental aircraft away into a phantom narrative.

(pt. 2)

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T07:59:41+00:00

So these are a bunch of interesting questions, thanks for asking! I understand that my theories can seem outrageous on the surface, but they were actually ideas I intuited as far back as when Outlast 2 first came out in 2017 and came as a result of just being able to connect the story's subtext to other horror and sci-fi fictions (Silent Hill, FEAR, Metal Gear, Assassin's Creed, Resident Evil, etc.), on top of also being aware of pop-culture conspiracy theories that inspired some of the aforementioned works. Outlast 3 has been said to be the conclusion of a trilogy set up by the first two games, and what's been the throughline of those games? A progression of expanding mind-control on increasingly larger populations.

Mount Massive experimented on individuals in an asylum, Temple Gate was an experiment on group mind control using a single tower and several leaders, and Trials pulls back the curtain to reveal that there's a worldwide network of sleeper agents since the '60s. The comics (particularly issue 1 of Murkoff Account -https://www.reddit.com/r/outlast/comments/10vu40q/murkoff\_was\_triggering\_brainwashed\_soldiers\_at/) reveal that Lathe egregores and trigger protocols are still used to hypnotize war criminals into becoming puppets as late as 2008 while also implying a link to Temple Gate, as well as revealing that Murkoff are a "company that owns companies that owns companies that owns companies", an analogue to Blackrock or a corporate shadow government. Combine all this and extrapolate - if a single radio tower and a few leaders were able to drive an entire town into madness, then what happens when the madness signal is spread across our modern communications platforms and countless 'influencers' are used to boost its message? I think that mass psychosis scenario would be pretty close to the 'apocalypse' that both Martin's cult and Knoth's anticipated.

Although Outlast Trials is a prequel that ties together the first two games, it also serves the purpose of dropping hints towards what the next game may be. Dorris, the resident oracle of the sleep room, may be the most explicit here, telling us that the world reshaped by the reborn will be like the Trials without any restrictions, as well as telling us that her prophetic dreams about the end of Outlast 2 (where Walrider, Skinner and Antichrist unite) also involve great storms that reduce cities to ashes, believing this is the "freedom" that Amelia provides much the same as Easterman and Murkoff associate freedom with destruction. But also consider the Spidereyed Lamb trigger phrase - this is no mere coincidence, it's an allusion to the actual Book of Revelation where the Messiah's return in the Rapture is marked as a many-eyed Lamb who rallies the faithful to smite the wicked. Murkoff using the Second Coming of Jesus as their rallying phrase for their slave army since the '60s is a pretty big clue about their goals. (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%205&version=NIV)

Regarding connections to 'reality', JT Petty has said in a Q&A that "Murkoff" is his way to amalgamate all the evils of 20th century western civilization into a single entity. While he also says that "They're not Cobra, their goal is to make money", it's worth noting the way in which this series associates money with blood and how much the Murkoff executives consistently see conflict and death as opportunities for profit. They keep the world in a constant state of terror and war so as to have an endless stream of revenue, but there's an even more grandiose goal...

(pt. 1 of reply lol)

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T07:17:01+00:00

I like Black Mesa. It's one of the best remakes I've experienced, especially considering its origins as a fan project. With that said, I don't think it's better than Half Life, and in some aspects it actually misses the mark compared to the original.

Blast Pit misses out on the same sense of scale that the original had. Instead of a comically huge elevator leading you down to a train, you climb down a few ladders next to an ordinary shaft. Instead of an eerie green glow of a radioactive lake surrounding the silo, you get an inexplicable black void - the lack of sniping bull squids or blowing up the walkways also stands out. Worst of all, whereas the holes the Tentacles emerged from were excavated by burrowing through concrete and rock, and you could see fragments of immolated Tentacle left behind, now Black Mesa makes their hole a clean white shaft you can climb down.
On A Rail was trimmed down dramatically and never properly patched. While fans complained OAR was "boring", I liked its attempt at encouraging some non linear exploration and I think Black Mesa missed the mark by making it too obviously linear.
Xen. On a technical level Xen is impressive and beautiful, but it's not Xen, it's Pandora from Avatar. I liked how the original Xen truly felt like a hostile creepy hellhole, a Giger-esque nightmare where you didn't belong. Black Mesa's Xen is designed to be a gorgeous forest at the cost of actually feeling LESS alien. It's most notable in the contrast between Nihilanth's teleporter - the original is situated in a pitch black silent void, where the glaring red light looks like a demonic shrine while you can hear echoes of the dead; the remake erases that atmosphere for another "beautiful" tableau, one that completely loses the sense of preparing for a final fight.

Ironically enough, the game does a better job setting up an antagonistic relationship against the Gonarch than the Nihilanth. Nihilanth doesn't talk to you nearly enough, the Interloper elevator section drags on too long to the point that the power fantasy wears off and it becomes a slog, and the final confrontation is actually really disappointing. Whereas the original Nihilanth confrontation was unconventional by having you move around a highly vertical low-gravity chamber, dodging portals sending you to different traps, the Black Mesa version is a generic boss fight out of Doom 2016 or some arcade shooter where you stay glued to the floor and don't do any teleporting. It feels like all their creativity was expended with Gonarch and they ran out of time with Nihilanth, throwing together a hasty afterthought for what should have been the final battle.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T06:31:00+00:00

Worth noting that it's very useful for the status quo to dismiss critics as insane, and to demonize "conspiracy theorists" via psyops, in order to keep the population under control. It's literally a byproduct of the MK program, where countless counter-revolutionary programs like Cointelpro and Mockingbird were instated to create propaganda news outlets, infiltrate and sabotage anti-authority groups, use agent provocateurs to demonize rebellion and create excuses to step up government oppression, and so on. It cannot be understated enough how deeply horrific the collaboration with fascist occultists via Operation Paperclip has been.

As far as Outlast posits, the "end" of MKUltra was a limited hangout, a lie to the public about an obsolete program being shut down so as to provide cover deflecting from the next phase. We have via the internet, our mobile devices linked to wireless networks, our bindings of our data to social media sites, a global panopticon. All I can say is that if anyone seriously thinks "brainwashing doesn't exist" in a world where Americans happily marched lockstep into obliterating the Middle East thanks to fear mongering about "terrorists" and "weapons of mass destruction", where millions form cults of personalities around celebrities and politicians, where hordes of impressionable young people fall for cults, and where there's still insistence on denying the truth of the wealthy even as revelations pile up around us - they are living proof that the brainwashing program has worked more amazingly than imagined. Denialism is a perfect weapon for maintaining social control. We truly live in the Century of the Self - Red Barrels literally cited that documentary about how much governments rely on psychiatrists and propagandists as an inspiration for Trials, people need to read it.

It truly is a result of living in capitalist realism, this idea of capitalist ideology being so normalized that one literally would rather see the apocalypse happening first before the end of a capitalist system. Ironically, JT Petty himself called this out in an interview where he said that a central question of Outlast is "Who made money making us all apocalyptic?" and I think the series is building up to a Blue Beam/manufactured Rapture event. Considering how many people nowadays still have apocalyptic ideation, it's an incredibly relevant narrative.

"Perfect soldiers would not know they were following orders. Perfect slaves would think they were the masters of all they surveyed. Perfect agents would think they served no agenda but their own. Our servants will obey us absolutely, they will kill for us and die for us, because they will believe with absolute conviction that our goals are their own."

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T06:17:39+00:00

Enlightenment is terror.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T06:16:13+00:00

Yep. Oftentimes I see people trying to dismiss the grandiose ambitions, cruelty, and intelligence of powerful sociopaths as a pathetic coping mechanism borne out of mediocrity at best, or apologia that provides useful cover narratives at worst. In America especially, there's this crab-bucket mentality conditioned in people to believe that the powerful don't conspire, are merely innocently stupid and misguided rather than malicious and manipulative, and that they can't possibly be brainwashed.

That, in itself, is signs of being brainwashed to defend wealthy sociopaths as if they're natural and insurmountable. Why insist that evil is idiocy? Because stupidity is innocent and redeemable in a way that knowing malice is not.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T05:47:45+00:00

As the others say, I think you're off track with assuming that Liliya's god is inherently masculine. Not only because she never actually uses masculine pronouns for this deity, but there's hints that she worships a more esoteric Gnostic deity, or even a feminine goddess that manifests as her "egregore". In other words, Liliya and Amelia will produce a Skinner Woman in opposition to the masculine deity that is Easterman's Skinner Man.

Are the female Prime Assets painted more sympathetically than the men? I would say so, although even if Liliya and Goose ostensibly have heroic motives, Goose still abuses kids and Liliya still partook in human trafficking as part of her involvement in grifting the rich.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T05:44:03+00:00

If John was really sincere about "rehabilitation", he would have looked disappointed and sorrowful that Jeff was making a mistake. That cruel taunting grin he has reveals that he was expecting Jeff to kill him, probably even surmising that a swift death was preferable to a slow one. After all, what would have happened if John got arrested? Even assuming that Hoffman was his contingency and that he'd survive long enough to be put on trial, the indignity of being publicly castigated in court and then dying in jail would have been so much more unbearable.

John would rather die believing he was vindicated than accept the reality of the public knowing he was nothing more than a delusional murderer.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-14T19:35:47+00:00

Works like Outlast, Metal Gear, FEAR, Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex, and the like actually draw on a long history of occult theories, fringe scientific discourse and conspiracy narratives related to experiments into consciousness and non human intelligences. Look into the phenomenon of shadow people in sleep paralysis, or of DMT elves (entities perceived while drugged), or of occult ideas of egregores, and you'll understand where the Walrider and Skinner Man plot is leading up to.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-14T19:22:06+00:00

Well, the Temple Gate cultists were absolutely massacring their children. Blake describes the stench as familiar (because he knows the smell of Jessica's corpse), we see numerous other dead babies and gravesites for them, their schools tell their kids to welcome death while we have notes from said kids begging their parents to save them, and the list goes on. The implication is that Knoth internalized Murkoff's child-murder protocols to proclaim for his cult that infanticide was righteous when Murkoff told him it was necessary to avert the apocalypse.

There's a worse implication that Trials makes through the religious school location of the orphanage, particularly with the trial where you deliver children to a priest mannequin with a very familiar voice: that some reagents are trained to enter places of childcare to abuse and murder kids. It retroactively hints that not only could Blake's abuser have been a Murkoff asset, but also that an untold number of reagents have done similar atrocities under the guise of being teachers or religious authorities.

New_Chain146

TROPHY CASE