One of my two perfect games. The best narrative possible in any media.
E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy is an indie game developed by a small french company Streum On studio, based on a Half Life mod they made, based on a pen and paper RPG they also made. Therefore, you can tell this is a labor of love right from the start.
Set in a cyberpunk world in a very distant future, E.Y.E. merges aesthetics so varied like Warhammer 40k armors with katanas and asian castles and some Blade Runner cities thrown in. The eclecticism of such mix surprisingly makes up a very solid visual foundation for a bleak dystopian future, where an entity known as the Metastreumonic force has torn mankind to shreds for its arrogance, and even then, humanity keeps fighting itself over petty qualms.
You assume the role of a soldier from the Culter branch of E.Y.E., the organization founded to fight against the Metastreumonic force using cybernetically augmented telepathic soldiers. After your last mission, you awake amnesic on a cave who knows where. After you leave, you try to rebuild whatever happened to your past without giving much hints about your current mental instability to your superiors, all the while dealing with the hostility from the Jian branch of E.Y.E., the Federation trying to end E.Y.E. and the bandits who prey over whoever crosses their grounds.
One thing that must be said about E.Y.E. is that, even if its use of the Source engine is masterful, is loaded with glitches and bugs. The main cause of this is that the amount of stuff you can do to overcome obstacles is borderline ridiculous. You can hack enemies to turn them against their own, or maybe to trick into seeing things that aren't there. You can summon demons from the Metastreumonic void as minions, or maybe robots. You can create telepathic clones of yourself, and, if you're not in the mood for any type of company, you can snipe them off, use a shotgun, a sword, or even stealth. For those who like exploring, there is always a non confrontational route. This options are not made evident from the start, because the game is not your baby sitter. There is a depth to everything that begs for you to sit and sift through it in order to have a taste of what this game's sweet, sweet core.
The game is mainly an RPG, both with stat building and something very interesting called research. This game has a tech tree more complex than most RTS games out there, all focused around upgrades for your character. The tech is based around a branching path furthered by random drops from enemies. There are stats requirements for weapons, and the best carrot on a stick is a mini nuclear warhead launcher.
But the point that really makes the game, and the one that makes any kind of technical prowess pale in comparison, is the story. Nowhere else will you find a more intense and personal story, if you have the patience to finish it. With patience, I don't mean the patience to endure bad things, but the patience to deal with a new form of narrative, a form exclusive to gaming and that elevates this game to art form. The story and the way that it's told, transcends the limits of the screen to become a metastory of sorts, appealing to indian mythology in order to justify from a narrative point most conventions in a game. Unfortunately, to tell more would be to spoil the beauty of it all, so, suffice it to say that the first ending is not the true one, and that is mandatory to press on.
Perfection in narrative, and sufficiency in all the rest elevates this game to perfect status in my list.