Primordial Muses: Pamela Ann Rymer

In my last post about the muses that inspired me in writing and designing Primordia, I talked about my great-aunt Virginia, whose influence on me began when I was a baby. I didn’t meet the second muse, Judge Pamela Ann Rymer, until I was in my 20s.

For lawyers on a certain career path, clerking for a judge serves as a kind of “finishing school” before the actual practice of law begins. It’s seen as a chance to “see how the sausage gets made”; to disabuse oneself of idealistic naivety and learn the practical reality of what wins or loses cases. But for me, clerking was the opposite—it inspired, rather than quashed, idealism. And the reason was Judge Rymer herself, whose tireless service to the law sowed the seed from which Primordia’s  character Clarity sprang, something recognized in one of the very first previews of the game.

The old flip the hair trick!

Pam Rymer was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1941. She graduated from Vassar College in 1961 (two years younger than is typical) and enrolled in Stanford Law School. She eventually became one of its “most revered alumni,” but at the time she stood out for being one of just a handful of women students.  Even a decade later, only 13% of the student body was female. Then and there, as at other times and other places, being brilliant was no answer to bias. In seeking a job at a major Los Angeles firm, she was told she was truly exceptional among all applicants... but all the same, no exception would be made to the all-male hiring policy. So she went elsewhere, and soon became the first woman law partner at the firm she joined. Joining a client and another partner for lunch at a private club, she was told to take the service elevator; women, after all, could not ride in the members’ elevator. But her will was unbreakable and her commitment to the law unshakeable. She firmly believed that individual grit and determination were what mattered, and in her case, she was right. In 1983 she was appointed as a federal judge and in in 1989 she was elevated to the Court of Appeals. 

Entry to the Ninth Circuit courthouse.

Orange you glad we changed the palette?

When I applied to work for Judge Rymer, she had been on the bench for over twenty years. In my job interview, the first thing she asked about was video games, since my resume included my work for TimeGate and Bioware while in law school. The judge didn’t have kids of her own, but her god-daughter was a gamer, and she was intrigued by the idea that games could have stories. We spent an hour on the subject, which we’d come back to many times over the years.

As I’ll explain, Judge Rymer’s exemplary character and jurisprudence were the biggest source of her influence on Primordia. But her curiosity about my work writing and designing games played an important role, too.

After I worked for Judge Rymer, I spent a second year clerking, this time at the Supreme Court. One day, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had retired but still kept chambers at the Court, invited me to stop by. She had heard from her “friend Pam” that I “designed video games.”

Justice O’Connor wanted to design a video game herself, she said, to help kids learn civics. She felt that we needed games that provoked discussions about law, government, rights, and justice. She allowed that she had never played video games herself, and interrogated me at length on the subject. To my surprise, three years later, she founded iCivics ”with the goal of transforming civic education for every student in America with innovative, truly engaging games and resources.” Any doubts about the commitment of a septuagenarian rancher-turned-jurist becoming a septuagenarian game designer as her last act proved wrong. This was just one more barrier for her to break.

It was Judge Rymer who set in motion the odd series of events that ended with Justice O’Connor’s insistence that games must provoke and engage with our core civic values. That lesson stayed with, and has guided my design and writing on the games I’ve worked on since. It’s one reason why (for better or worse) I stayed with my vision for Primordia’s story and rejected my teammate’s suggestion that we replace its “technical and political” conflicts with a “simple and emotional” “rescue the princess storyline.” 

And beyond this, Judge Rymer directly influenced Primordia’s characters, as well as its locations and puzzles.

One of the game’s most memorable characters is Clarity Arbiterbuilt, “law clerk to Arbiter, judge of Metropol.” Though Clarity was born from many influences (including another judge, Judge Dredd, and Vhailor from Planescape: Torment), the heart of the character came from Judge Rymer.

Let me caveat this right away: Judge Rymer was rightly remembered for being “quick to laugh and to smile” and rightly renowned for her “sense of humor” (described by one judicial colleague as “playful” and another as “wicked”). She was quirky—having pranked a law partner by hiding a live frog in his desk, she eventually came to own a vast collection of frog paraphernalia. She was an avid tennis player and a lover of college football and corndogs. None of these qualities, nor her mentorship of young lawyers, are present in Clarity.

But as one of her closest friends on the bench wrote, “Finding the right answer ... and doing the law correctly were foremost in her mind in every matter.” Justice was the destination to be found; the law, the roadmap to be followed. This “foremost” characteristic is likewise at the heart of Clarity. And while Judge Rymer would never have said “mercy is malware” (as Clarity does), her first real job was working on the presidential campaign in which Barry Goldwater uttered his (in)famous line that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” And as a judge, her sternness in applying the law had yielded the nickname “Penitentiary Pam.”

As much as she revered the law, she also revered the facts. In Primordia, Clarity admonishes Horatio not to “characterize the evidence.” This came straight from Judge Rymer—her clerks were not to argue the facts, let alone shade the facts. We were to study the facts and report them. To those facts, the law was to be applied impartially and implacably. Just as Clarity ultimately concludes that Horatio has no legal claim against Scraper (despite Clarity’s loathing of MetroMind), so too did I watch Judge Rymer refuse to rule against “bad guys” when the facts and the law could not support a claim. Those proven guilty had no reason to expect mercy; but those who had not been proven guilty according to the law and the evidence could be confident in impartial justice.

If Clarity had “strength, indomitable spirit, and an incredible work ethic,” that was because Judge Rymer was her model; if Clarity was a “brilliant jurist and a loyal friend,” that was again because Judge Rymer was her model. These were qualities praised in the judge after she passed away from cancer, having worked to very end in the cause of justice.

For obvious reasons, the experience of serving as a law clerk to Judge Rymer shaped not Clarity but also Clarity’s co-clerk (and sister) Charity, and their dynamic with Metropol’s judge, Arbiter. Arbiter’s casual condescension toward Clarity (and, indeed, MetroMind) had nothing to do with my own experience as a law clerk—but it reflected the experiences Judge Rymer recounted to me of the headwinds she had sailed into as a lawyer.

Horatio appears before Arbiter Manbuilt in the courthouse.

All this is to say that not only key characters in Primordia, but also key story beats (such as the struggle for control of Metropol), key areas (such as the courthouse and Clarity’s island), key puzzles (such as the legal dispute between Oswald and Cornelius), and a core theme (the dialectic among law, mercy, and justice) all owe a debt to Judge Rymer. I couldn’t have created any of those things without the time I spent working with her.

My writing itself also owes a debt to Judge Rymer. She was superb writer who was known for her “unparalleled ability to cut to the core of a legal issue and resolve it in a succinct gem of an opinion.” I’ve said before that legal writing influenced my game writing, and vice versa. And she was quite a teacher of legal writing. Over the course of the year, she drilled into us the need to start by reading everything we could, and then distill it down as much as possible. That kind of broad research was key to Primordia (and Strangeland and Fallen Gods). I can’t bring myself to shed ornamentation the way she did. But her lessons about revision, pacing, and punchiness were all things that I used on Primordia (and the games I worked on since).

The judge knew about Primordia while I was writing it. While she had no personal interest in computer games or science fiction (her one speculative-fiction vice was Harry Potter), she was—as one obituary noted—“a tremendous mentor and lifelong friend of her clerks.” So she checked in on my work as a lawyer, my hobby as a writer, and most of all, my daughter (a partial namesake of the judge’s), who had been born just before we started developing Primordia. But, alas, I didn’t tell her about Clarity, Charity, and Arbiter, or about solving legal puzzles and adjudicating science-fictional lawsuits. In a mistake I have made too often, I wanted to show her our game, which I was confident we would finish soon. I knew about the disease my friend was fighting, but I also knew she was indomitable.

She was. But her body was not, and she shed its burden on September 21, 2011. Nevertheless, her soul still fills the world, the law, and the hearts of the myriad lawyers she mentored and inspired. And though she died a year before Primordia was finally complete, her soul fills its world and characters, too.

Primordial Muses: Virginia Mishnun-Hardman

Between dream and deed,
Between thought and thing
Made real on the potter’s wheel,
The abyss is not less
Than between the living and unliving.

- Virginia Mishnun-Hardman, “The Inheritors”

When Primordia turned 10 years old, I mentioned that I wanted to share some retrospective thoughts about making the game. Unfortunately, the press of life, family, work, and Fallen Gods kept me from diving in immediately. But a longtime fan of the game recently asked me where its themes of humanism, post-human inheritors, and dignity and defiance in the face of hopelessness came from. All of us who made the game, including James, Vic, Nathaniel, Dave, the voice actors, drew on our own experiences, and each of us had different muses. I thought it would be nice to talk about mine, and how they inspired the game’s writing and design. 

The first muse I want to talk about is my great aunt, the poet Virginia Mishnun-Hardman. 

To start with, wherefor and wherefrom Humanism? Well….

Aunt Virginia’s influence on the world, themes, story, and characters of Primordia is something recognized from the very outset, when John Scalzi graciously hosted a “Big Idea” about Primordia on the day of the game’s release. Rather than just repeat that homage, I’d like to expand upon it, both with a bit more biography and with more of her poetry.

Virginia Mishnun was born around the turn of the 20th century and died at the turn of the 21st century. Her home was New York City, the ultimate metropolis, but she found welcome in Mexico City, Rockport, and Tel Aviv. A graduate of Hunter College and Columbia University, she passed through many trades in her life (including dance, reporting, editing, and social work). But she was foremost a poet and an activist. Her cause was humanity—meaning both the collective of our vast, flawed species, and that quality of ours that redeems those flaws. She was an advocate for refugees and the dispossessed (including as an editor of the International Rescue and Relief Committee Bulletin during the Holocaust), for women, for Native Americans, and for workers. Alongside her second husband, J.B.S. Hardman, she worked in the labor movement.

After J.B.’s death in 1968, Virignia wrote the poem “Wait for Me”: “As all our lives you went ahead / To find new lands, / So now I’m briefly left behind once more / While you explore a shore I still can’t see / And I again cry, / ‘Wait—oh wait for me.’” But, by the grace of nature and nature’s god, she lingered not “briefly” but at length, and so was a part of my life for over two decades. It’s thanks to her that I’m a writer, and thanks to her that I wrote Primordia.

As a poet, she published two anthologies (The Inheritors and Bright Winter), and many standalone poems in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. The anti-fascist Spanish poet León Felipe called her “a consolation and a miracle.” The American philosopher and scholar Maxine Greene celebrated Virginia’s “remarkable ability to render torment and isolation into a celebration of human life.” And the novelist and critic Waldo Frank called her “the most living American poet since Hart Crane”—a line of praise that underscores the ephemeral nature of poets’ fame, since, but for that quotation, I wouldn’t know Hart Crane from Ichabod Crane.

My aunt was a fervent, lifelong socialist, but with equal fervor she despised the inhumanity and dishonesty of the Soviet Communists. When Stalin betrayed the cause of anti-fascism and made his pact with Hitler, she saw friends and allies from the labor movement turn on a dime, praising the same Fuhrer they had reviled days earlier. Anyone who has read Orwell knows the socialists’ sense of rage and betrayal at this about-face. As she told me years later, she saw good people hollowed by lies; they became “shells.” They had, she said, turned the poetic language of progress into empty sloganeering. That the USSR later helped demolish the Nazis never changed her view; hers was a socialism that had at its heart the conviction that human beings and human tragedy could never be reduced to “a statistic.” If, in these lessons she taught me, you recognize the roots of MetroMind and the shells that drag themselves through the Underworks, you would not be wrong.

Aunt Virginia’s socialist activism was her entree into science fiction because many science fiction authors of the late 19th and early 20th century used their novels as an extension of their progressive politics. On her bookshelves were first editions of H.G. Wells’s science fiction novels—alongside his socialist writings. So too did she have the science fiction of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others. This is, of course, “respectable” science fiction, so typically bookstores stock such novels on the “Classics” shelf. But to Virginia, that was flat wrong. Respectability and enshrinement were a kind of tomb. Great books are “vital” precisely because they are “alive” and accessible.

It was from this perspective that she embraced, nurtured, sheltered, and encouraged my love of science fiction and fantasy. As is covered in the “Big Idea,” she was the rare adult who taught that “growing up” was a struggle against the loss of imagination rather than, as St. Paul wrote, a process of “put[ting] away childish things.” In her poem “Dreams In Age,” she wrote: “Like water colors / Erased by life’s deluge / Are the dreams of youth.” Her own life’s deluge had been torrential. But she helped shield the watercolors of my youthful dreams.

We told stories together. In one of the lower moments of my childhood, my family had moved across the country, I had left my friends behind, and I was subjected to a teacher who, among other things, forced me to write a letter to my parents apologizing for being stupid and incompetent at English. That same year Aunt Virginia sent me for Christmas a near-mint copy of Bright Winter addressed to “Mark, dear fellow writer.” On the frontispiece she inscribed “a new poem”: “To be hunted.” “... oh, the terror of the / Poet, prey, destroyed again / And again ....” She did, indeed, know how “to render torment and isolation into a celebration of human life.”

Years later, in college, when I told her I had spent months writing a poem about Hector’s death beneath the walls of Troy, only to have my Classics professor dismiss it as worthless, she shot back a short note: “Let us pause to urinate / on the over-lauded laureate.” She knew what she was doing. As she said in “On Learning”: “They say / grief teaches. / But I learn faster / When joy’s the master.”

When I wrote a trio of science fiction stories in 2000, she found the core of each and helped me refine them all. One, “The Skinny Mnemonsyne,” features the first incarnation of the Underworks and its memory-less shells. Another was “New Mansions,” and it established themes I’d later elaborate in Primordia. No doubt inspired by “The Heart of Steel” arc in Batman: The Animated Series, its premise is that a faction of humanity seeks to replace flawed politicians and judges with incorruptible robotic doppelgangers (foreshadowing Primordia’s Arbiter, visually modeled off of BTAS’s H.A.R.D.A.C.). The protagonist is the first of these doppelgangers, a war veteran unaware of his own identity and programmed to venerate humanity (like Horatio/Horus). I was stumped by the ending until Virginia observed that, if he had been programmed to venerate humanity, he would destroy himself and the doppelganger scheme to spare mankind its downfall. Thus she sowed the seeds of the Horus’s sacrifice and Autonomous 8’s awakening in my Primordia spin-off story “Fallen.” (Alas, despite Virginia’s best efforts, I don’t think “New Mansions” is a particularly good story….)

The last work of mine that Aunt Virginia edited was a 300-page manuscript of a fantasy novel I sent her in 2001, when she was in her nineties. With a claw-like hand tortured by arthritis and gout, she line edited every page in her shaky script. 

On the first page (a prologue entitled “Upon the Web”), she stuck a Post-It note: “Between us, there is a web without end.” She died just two years later. She was, indeed, a “consolation and a miracle.”

Virginia’s poetry is about love, loss, injustice, war, the Holocaust, violence against women, the act and art of creation, and hope. Her poem “A Visitor From Buchenwald” was published and regularly recited in New York, Rockport, Mexico City, and Tel Aviv, in English and Spanish.

But these respectable themes are embedded in the imagination, energy, and language of science fiction and, in particular, post-apocalyptic science fiction. In “In Time of Testing,” written after the death of her husband J.B. and in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Virginia imagines a post-apocalyptic landscape in which humanity gives way to machines. She tells of “the pizzicato of fat rats scurrying through / The wonderful garbage that was once a world.” And she asks, “Why use men when we can get the answers / from the do-it-themselves dream-proof machines? / After all, the Divine Engine will soon arrive. It was programmed / To appear at the end of the third act, which is where we’re at.” “Play computers? Let the computers play!” When she wrote that poem, first published in John Herling’s Labor Letter in 1970, could she have imagined the unborn grand-nephew who would play computers and let the computers play, and tell the story of robots scurrying through the wonderful garbage that was once a world?

Above all, it was her post-apocalyptic poem “The Inheritors” that shaped Primordia. 

In the extraordinary essay “Poetry and People” that precedes “The Inheritors” in the collection of the same name, Virginia writes: “Both Dr. Zhivago and Last of the Just enlarge us, make us thrillingly aware of our own dormant capacities for living fully like compassionate humans, even in an inhuman world. They give us confidence that this species need not perish; that it can indeed transform itself, and in the transformation be more human than it yet has been. The overtones that reverberate long after the stories end are those of awful victory, suggesting that the unyielding assertion of individual humanity may be the only possible triumph in the present Twilight of Mankind.” In Primordia, I strove to tell my own story about the “unyielding assertion of individual humanity,” a world in which “the species need not perish” even though it has vanished.

So too is Virginia’s poem set in a world destroyed by war, bereft of humanity, and left to our inheritors, to whom we are merely “a theory ... with false glories and iniquities.”

I sing of the race that came to be

After man’s brief tyranny

Over all beasts ceased,

And we became a theory

In another species’ pre-history;

Endowed, as theories often are,

With false glories and iniquities.

The truth is, we lost our vision.

In the man-pit of night

We fought for light;

And with faith in fission

Lit one blaze too bright.

The world will never see such flames again,

Nor know the dream and worth that was in men.

Anyone who has played Primordia will feel at home in these verses, which helped shape the game’s characters, setting, lore, and themes. At one moment, two figures in “The Inheritors” muse and speculate about the humans’ demise—and, again, those familiar with Primordia’s War of the Four Cities may hear the strains the game echoed. One character says, “One theory holds they had / Machines of such complexity / Only two brothers knew the key / To the whole world’s productivity.” The other answers, “The two were rivals; / Fighting one day, / Each slew the other.” Of the inheritors, we learn they pass “through immensities of galaxies and centuries, / Singing; with one small phrase forever altering / The endlessly unfolding theme / Of which each is briefly dreamer and dream.” Here is the seed of Civitas and its robots singing their eternal harmony. The poem wisely warns: “Greed beat the drum you followed, / Proud and blind into oblivion.”

But while “The Inheritors” had the most influence on Primordia, other poems of hers helped create Horatio, Crispin, and other characters, as well as the setting. As for Horatio, consider, “Memo from Our Fathers”: “For faith / There are no substitutes. / The destroyers are always / Ready to attack. / But the builders know that their task is / To build; / That only when the wilderness within / Is stilled / Will the wilderness without / Move back.” This is, of course, Horatio’s arc: becoming a “builder” rather than a “destroyer,” and achieving this victory over the waste outside of him by first achieving victory over the waste inside of him. For the setting, there is the horrifying “No Last Waltz, A Requiem,” which depicts with nightmarish imagery what it is to destroy a world and leave behind a “dead planet.” There is “Two Ways,” which tells of how, “Drowning in the dry sands / Go the acquisitors....” And on the phonograph of Primordia’s UNNIIC, you can hear the song “Dreams of Green,” my homage to Virginia’s “Mimosa Tree”: “Under the green mimosa tree / How green the dream I dream of you.”

Of course, Virginia’s poems were by no means the only, or even the primary, influence on Primordia’s world and story. I drew on my love of games like Planescape: Torment and Fallout, childhood cartoons like The Challenge of the GoBots and He-Man, books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy and City by Clifford Simak, movies like Metropolis and Wall-E, classics from Shakespeare and Milton, as well as countless other inspirations from life and art. Crispin, for instance, is not much different from my own normal snark, subject to James’s prodding and encouragement. Goliath is based on a giant sculpture (“The Awakening”) that I would climb on as a kid. And so on. And of course Vic looked to the wasteland and cityscape of Beneath a Steel Sky, the famous biomechanical style of H.R. Giger, and other influences. Nathaniel filled the world with music drawn from sources like Vangelis and Wendy Carlos. Creating Primordia was truly a team effort, where each of us wove our creativity into a unified whole. Much of our inspiration came from each other.

In her poem “Warnings,” my aunt wrote: “They lack a future / Who befoul the past.” Sometimes, the befoulers of the past manage to drag themselves quite far into the future. But here, as elsewhere, I trust my aunt’s wisdom. Her eyes were always on the future—one eye fearful, one eye hopeful—but she drew from the wealth of the past to face those fears and realize those hopes. She is, for me, part of that wealth. For that and for what it meant for Primordia, I will be forever grateful.

Marauder Films Adapting Primordia

 As I’ve mentioned before, a couple years ago we were approached by Bastiaan Koch of Marauder Film about adapting Primordia into TV or film. Bastiaan is an acclaimed VFX artist able to push the visuals to the next level, and he has had a longstanding interest in post-apocalyptic settings and robots, making him a great match to our game. (Just to hit a few of the highlights: Bastiaan is a VFX Supervisor at FuseFX and a veteran of LucasFilm, and he’s been a part of three Oscar-winning and five Oscar-nominated VFX teams.)

As anyone who has worked in the industry knows, it’s a lot easier to express interest in adapting a game than to actually adapt one, particularly when the game wasn’t trying to be “cinematic” at the outset (the way modern AAA action games are, for instance). But Bastiaan has stuck with the project doggedly—through a pandemic, no less—and, along with others (including Walker McKnight), has put together an initial screenplay and outline for a Primordia movie. Walker is himself the winner of the Academy’s prestigious Nicholl Fellowship for screenwriting.

What they’ve crafted is not “Primordia the game in a screenplay format.” Instead, Bastiaan and Walker found the elements of the game that resonated with them most, and as well as the elements that go best in the cinematic medium, and then they added a great deal of themselves and their own vision into the project. That’s how it has to be. The thought of folks creating something out of Primordia without putting their own souls into it would be terrible! A theme of Primordia is humanity’s inheritors taking responsibility for building a new world rather than mechanistically sticking to their programming in a context where it no longer made sense! So too with this: if Marauder manages to pull this off (and so far, Bastiaan has proven indefatigable), they will bring forth a new world of Primordia, rooted in the old one to be sure, but suited to new creators in a new context.

As a jumping off point, here are some thoughts from Bastiaan:

Ultimately, I expect this will be a different story with different dialogue and a different take on the characters and themes than mine, different visuals from Vic’s, different voices from Abe’s, Logan’s, and Sarah’s, different music from Nathaniel’s... and of course none of my puzzles or inventory mischief! But for the reasons above, I see a reworking in a different medium as something different from a sequel or a remake.  Primordia the game will still be the product of my soul (and Vic’s, James’s, and everyone else who poured work into it. For me, this will be the chance to explore that world we created through the eyes of a guest, rather than those of a host!

Primordia Turns 10

Over the next few days, we will be sharing in various places our reminiscences about developing Primordia. But first, a few numbers:

• 10 years since release

• 3 friends who set out on the adventure of making this game

• 306,105 copies sold

• 17th place, its highest ranking on Steam (September 21, 2015)

• 2582 days in the top 250 on Steam

• 2911 Steam player ratings, 160 GOG.com player reviews, 187 MetaCritic player ratings

•  7 completed fan translations (French,  German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian)

• 1 and only Crispin

• infinite gratitude for you, our fans, who defied the critics, loved our game, and supported us over this decade

It’s been a helluva decade!

Strangeland Releasing 5/25

 

Just a few days left till Strangeland is released!  For the tiny percentage of the population who reads our site, has not wishlisted the game, and can somehow be persuaded to do so: please consider wishlisting, as it will help our visibility on launch.

Wadjet Eye Games Publishing Strangeland

We are delighted to announce that Wadjet Eye Games is publishing Strangeland. Many years in the making, Strangeland is a “cabinet of curiosities” comprising the striking memories and bizarre visions that Victor Pflug (artist) and I (Mark Yohalem, writer/designer) have gathered over our lives. That cabinet has been built with thousands of hours of care by Dimitrios Thanasias-Spanos (coder).

Put otherwise, and as our last update probably indicated, Strangeland is as personal a game as I can imagine making. I spent the last weeks annotating its more obscure references, and realized it really is a map from my childhood wonders and fears to adulthood’s responsibility, regret, and recognition. I know Vic drew deeply from the well of his own personal experiences. Further, Dimitrios has achieved things with the engine (Adventure Game Studio) that no one has ever done before, allowing Vic’s surreal imagery to come to life in smooth and seamless way, and he has done through by throwing all of himself into the game’s development.

Given all the toil and anguish that went into making it, there’s no one we’d be more comfortable entrusting the game’s publication to than WEG. Our collaboration on Primordia was not just a business relationship, but a friendship and creative partnership. Dave Gilbert is second to none in directing voice acting, and WEG has earned a well-deserved reputation for releasing thoughtful games that hearken back to the classics while presenting innovations in setting, design, and narrative. We are proud that Primordia is a part of that legacy, and we are excited that Strangeland will be part of it, too. 

Bradbury, Goya, and Peake: Discussing Some of Strangeland's Inspirations

The seed of Strangeland’s narrative was sadness, and the soil in which it fell included the works of Mervyn Peake, Francisco Goya, and Ray Bradbury.

Read more in this development update on Steam.