Beyond Leviathan

[Ghost/Diaphragms] aims to explore the rough/soft edges of the visual worlds of games, and the ways in which we haunt those spaces. Each series, focused on one title, is composed of a selection of shots taken in-game and accompanied by a short text. Today’s series, Beyond Leviathan, features shots from Bungie’s Destiny 2 : Beyond Light (2020).

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Beneath the ice of Europa lies a Deep Stone Crypt. It’s a place of power, both physical – as Beyond Light‘s titular location for the end-game raid activity – and metaphorical ; the moon as a whole acts as some kind of burial mound, a planet-sized vault filled with corporate secrets and space magic. It’s also the place from which have emerged the Exos, each of them a human mind transfered to a robot’s body through means whose exact technicalities are long forgotten by the time the game starts. The process is a gruelling exercice of soul-stripping though, so much so that reboots are often required in order to get the consciousness to adapt itself to the new body – hence the number at the end of their name, indicating how many times the mind had to start over. They’re Destiny‘s haunted machines, fleshy spirits turned metal and whose only guide through the world is a set of unreliable memories. As with most things encompassing the Destiny experience, this lore is as superfluous to the gameplay as it’s central to understanding the setting of the game’s latest’s expansion. The Crypt’s true nature, as stated, is two-fold : It’s both an actual, tangible ruin and a subroutine that every Exo experiences at some point of existence, in the shape of a recurring dream where they have to fight their way to a tower by killing every single individual they’ve ever known – in this life or the previous. While some are lucky enough to walk there peacefully, most of them don’t. At the end of the day, very few make it. consume enhance replicate. Their grind – much like ours as players – never ends.

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Destiny 2 : Beyond Light takes this tension and buries it deep at the heart of its story. Nearly a decade in the works, Europa is a place of revelation ; the tasks and movements may be familiar (track down a Fallen warlord, unearth some ancient powers, garner exotic loot) but they speak of a larger conspiracy at play in ways Destiny only hinted at before. The core of the plot here revolves around the dark discoveries of Clovis Bray I – the founder of the game’s Weyland-Yutani-like corporation. His decrepit installations litter the underbelly of Europa, serving as fragmentary passages in another attempt by Destiny to recontextualize the failures of its Golden Age. In a way Beyond Light‘s Europa acts as the catalyst for the lore’s most obsessive threads : The Fallen reinvest the moon’s colonial space to make a home for themselves – before we cast them out (again) at one of their own’s behest -, the fabled Crypt opens itself wide to us, but most importantly the Exo Stranger (Destiny‘s infamous McGuffin of a character) finally returns. With her a threshold is crossed ; secrets are unearthed, names are given and Darkness becomes Stasis.

Light versus Dark has always been the central conceit of Destiny‘s narrative, formulated again and again with each new expansion (A Gardener in conversation with a Winnower, a man with a Golden Gun against a grim Dredgen). The game quietly acknowledges our quality as undead killing machines while constantly trying to shift our vision, even if just a little – the Light’s Traveler may not be trusted, heroes are not always what they seem, etc. This is something the game insists on – and brilliantly fails to act upon, though that’s a conversation for another day – at every turn. For Bungie, Beyond Light is the first step in bringing this conflict front and center, as something affecting both story and gameplay. Stasis, the expansion’s new dark-based subclass, denotes a standstill. It’s a literal freezing power that eventually shatters everything it touches. Fundamentally, this arrival changes nothing : You still mow down hundreds of aliens, toil for hours on end to get marginally better guns and watch all the interesting stuff in the game unfold in lore books. Yet with it we, as players, can do something never before possible in Destiny ; adding to the space rather than subtracting its antagonistic variables. It’s not always massively efficient as a tool to damage bosses or clear entire rooms of enemies like some of its Light-counterparts, but Stasis has one ace up its sleeves : It shoots large crystals, primarily serving as cover during the gunfights – and even has a gun solely dedicated to this function in Salvation’s Grip. But what interests me here is not the primary purpose of the ability but rather what lies outside of its natural processes. In other words, using Stasis as scaffolding to explore Beyond Light‘s maps. And Europa, as it happens, is absolutely full of holes.

As space makers, Bungie are rarely actively hostile to players ; Destiny might feature more invisible deathwalls than Halo in its days, but their level-design tends to lean towards epic grandeur and allowing a large freedom of movement, one that extends beyond the limits of the game’s desired terrains provided you can find the right gap. It’s a long, often-arduous process of trial and error to figure out which step leads into an unknown that won’t kill you and force a reset of progress, or evict you outright from spaces that were never supposed to be infiltrated in the first place. To do so is an act of refusal. We leave the territory where the game happens to reach the one where it is no longer possible, or was still being sketched out. Destiny makes this gesture essential to surviving its long-term vision of repetition, and as such Stasis operates as an incredible facilitator – allowing the player to bypass impossible structures & chasms (One trick with the Stasis gun consists of clipping through walls by shooting a crystal at your feet, and in doing so having your character squeezed in-between collisions). You’re not supposed to be here, and the game makes it all the more apparent in the way its visuals start to contort under the pressure of our first-person camera. Moving around behind the walls, under the digital soil erases parts of the landscape while revealing others ; the operation can turn mountains into hollow cradles and inversely empty some spaces. At their most expressive, the depths of Beyond Light are necrotic seas, half-relics of Clovis Bray’s hubris, half-skeleton of Bungie‘s ambitions, until eventually both morph into a single, nebulous entity made up of the game’s stark expanses, constantly trying to decide on a version of itself as we move in between its layers. A composite Leviathan.

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In Destiny, the Leviathan is a subject of both Light and Dark. Its name simultaneously encompasses a mysterious sea-dwelling disciple of the Traveler and the planet-eating ship of Calus – an ambiguous despot in exile. By definition, the creature is too big to glimpse or fully comprehend. In Bungie‘s world, it is a promise : A long-departed prophet from a distant planet ; a luxurious vessel filled with loot for the Guardians to ransack, again and again. A symbolical apocalypse worth fighting for.

Towards the end of the Deep Stone Crypt raid, it is revealed that Clovis Bray I communed with a statue of the Darkness in order to give birth to the Exos, mixing this arcane knowledge with the radiolaria of the Vex – the game’s race of heinous mechanical aliens – to create “la Fontaine de Jouvence“. His ultimate goal is not to save humanity but merely to be its sole genetic point of origin, by reincarnating himself over and over again through different bodies. He aspires to be, in his own words, a “Leviathan to these dream aphids“; for his robots to wholly surrender themselves to his tyrannical project. In one of Bray’s facilities, we find a dead Exo cursing his very own Frankenstein :

“They tell me I was a pilot. Yet I do not dream of flying. I dream of hurling myself at screaming hordes. I dream of picking the fleshy-pink face of Clovis Bray out of a crowd of thousands. I dream of hoisting an axe high and driving it down to split his fragile skull.”

That violence on the brain is the driving essence of Beyond Light‘s power dynamics ; a retelling of Destiny’s history of domination through the tale of the Exos. Much like Hobbes‘ Leviathan, it’s hard to exactly delineate where the monster originating from the Clovis Bray corporation starts and where it ends. It’s a promise of commonwealth in the pursuit of immortality, of spaces so infinite they’re actually unreachable. Bray’s wish to devour endlessly in the face of death echoes our own on some level ; stuck in a state before and after the game, we can only circulate around the map’s edge. In this context, what’s the meaning of capturing what lies out of bounds – while so clearly being a product of what those boudaries contain ?

To warp the architecture of these spaces is, in a sense, a reenactment. A Crypt chrysalis so as to will Leviathan into existence, bits by bits. Though let’s make things clear : I didn’t set out to find some serpentine monster of capital while going out of the map. I just bounced around joyfully, trying to see how far I could take the simulation before reaching a final sea. Yet every detour brought me closer to a shape that never comes. If not fully understood we can at least try to chase the beast in fragments, bearing witness to its shimmering scales before the lights go out. Like the Exos, it’s impossible to precisely locate the source of this plight, still every reset brings with it the possibility of something different, of altering the cycle by being a pilot instead of a warrior. Of course the game won’t truly allow it so the refusal must happen away from the structure before eventually I, too, must return. For this is the nature of Bungie‘s monster.