The Great Machine

The Great Machine is a video game in the adventure genre originally released in 2005. It is currently playable on DOS.

The Great Machine is an allegory of thousands of years of cyclical human history (lessons unlearned, doomed to repeat themselves) wrapped in continuous wars and military conflicts wherever there are people; the cruel teeth of its gears greased with the blood of young idealists and its furnaces fed with the desecrated bodies of innocent non-combatants. The function of the machine is none other than the self-perpetuation of its own antisocial functioning. For some reason, war is a popular theme for games, probably due to an aseptic presentation, which emphasizes the glamorous aspect of saving villages by destroying them. This game doesn't mess around.

The player directs the irrelevant decisions of a little man caught in the crossfire, forced by circumstances to serve a tour of duty in his nation's army and attempt to kill other men like himself based on the orders of his supervising officers, who must have good, if undisclosed, reasons for giving such instructions. The protagonist is assigned the black operation of the assassination of a charismatic cult leader, 'Los', whose unaligned activities of the group are undermining the effectiveness of his unit's operations in the area.

With some ambivalence, but eager to stay on the right side of the gun, the player enters the grim brutality of a tormented and crazed world, whose pale absurdity is underscored by continual nightmares and hallucinations, whether the result of supernatural forces or incipient hammer-induced dementia.

The author, Jonas Kyratzes, here moves away from the Myst-style first-person graphic adventure genre that has inspired his other works of philosophical activism in games, presenting instead the effects (and futility) of human action in the face of the madness of the trenches through a multiple-choice adventure of text language, resulting in many moody readings-which occasionally shift from prose to free verse to indicate the harsh effects of sudden physical (and gradually mental and emotional) trauma-among the player's opportunities for input.

Like Mercy, the game is entirely secondary to the story being told; the author presents a morality play about authority and how, as Mao said, all political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The player is not the author of this story, but merely a player in its setting, endlessly going through the mindless motions, amidst elusive sparks of genuine hope, of an existential nightmare from which there is no escape: the 'boot of Orwell, which stamps a human face forever'.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.