The machine god is the mysterious and end game character in the survival horror RPG Fear and Hunger 2 Termina. In this video we what we know, and the lore of the Machine God and it’s objective and origins.

Also if you liked my video on the Machine God, you’ll like my video on the Dungeon of Fear and Hunger

Video Transcript follows:

Intro

Europa had been burning due to the great war. The Bremen army and the Eastern Union have been in full direct military confrontation for years; but at last, there are rumors a peace treaty is in the works. The Kaiser of the Bremen Empire had taken control of the small city of Prehavil, and immediately started suing for peace.

As if the entire war was a pretext to occupy this city. Perhaps the Bremen Empire and the Kaiser knew that there was something special .. or different there. Could the Bremen spies in the city inform the Empire that there was a reason that the Eastern Union had built miles and miles of bunkers underneath the city? Perhaps the spies of the empire working at the museum passed on information back about some secret excavation underneath the museum. Why would they be moving heavy digging equipment to the museum in the center of the city?

There had to be something under the city. What was so important that the course of the war would pivot on this unremarkable old fashioned city? Rumors had made it out of the city of a project called “Logic” being worked on by the smartest engineers. Rebel groups, the Empire and the Union all seem fixated on this city. Report of some tool called Telectroscope had been intercepted

Fear and Hunger 2: Termina is what you get when you mix Battle Royale + Majora’s Mask and the Cthulhu mythos. PC Survival horror RPG available on Steam created by Miro …

In this video, we’ll explore the mystery of the telectroscope, the Logic, The machine god and what happens in the game Fear and Hunger 2

We will be covering in detail some parts of the endgame, so massive spoilers ahead. If you like a challenge and a fascinating, though cruel world to explore, it’s best explored with no spoilers, check the game out and then come back. Though content warning, it is a game made for adults with lots of very heavy themes

My name is John and this is my channel TacoBanana, where I post about stuff I like. I’m a lifelong gamer and have been a scientist/engineer my entire adult life. As you’ll be able to tell by browsing my channel i’m fascinated by tech and science, so just a heads up, I’ll be posting a bit of AI generated video and imagery, since I’ve already generated it, and I think it’s cool

OK here are words I’ve prepared 

Transition!

What got us here (Events leading up to Fear and Hunger 2)

Fear and Hunger 2 is set about 600 years after the events of the first game, which it self takes place in around the year 1400. The story and lore of the first game is rich, and I won’t be able to even cover a small part of it in this video, here’s what you need to know

Four characters, for different reasons, are attempting to separately break into the Kingdom of Rondon’s Dungeon of Fear and Hunger to rescue Lagard, charismatic leader of the mercenary band Knights of the Midnight suns. Like Icarus, Lagard had flown too close to the sun, and angered the powers that be of the kingdom, which led to him being arrested and thrown into the deepest, darkest Dungeon in the Kingdom.

“The prophesied one… Already while still alive, there were many tales written and sung about his tale. We don’t know where the prophecy got started but needless to say that it’s all fallacy. But the man himself… Is a curious kind. There is definitely something different about him and whatever his part might be in the greater scheme of things, the very least he started something larger…”

– The New Gods about Le’garde.

Cahara the Mercenary, Enki the Dark Priest, D’arce the Knight and Ragv the outlander descended into the dungeon to find Lagard, only to discover they had been led there for reasons unknown to them. Lagard had staged the entire situation, so that he’d end up in the bottom level of the dungeon, with capable people that could help his expedition.

Lagard knew the dungeon’s greatest secret, and the reason the dungeon had descended into a storm of violence and miasma. There was a door, at the very bottom of the dungeon, that only opened with a special cube. A cube that Lagard had destroyed Ragv’s hometown to steal. Behind this ancient door waits the ancient city of Ma’habre. City of the gods

Ma’habre is the ancient city where the fellowship had traveled to in the year 800, 800 years before the events of Fear and Hunger 1 and 1400 years before the festival of Termina in pt2. An ancient city that still held traces of the new and old gods that existed in an impossible space. It felt like this city should not be able to exist.

See, in the world of Fear and Hunger, it is possible for mere humans to rise to be gods, or so they thought. And it was in Ma’habre where they would come with their aspirations of godhood, and Lagard was the most recent in that tradition. He had engineered his own capture to get himself closer to the ancient city and here he wanted to ascend to godhood himself, and he’d do anything to get this power. 

But it was for a good cause he told himself, maybe honestly, maybe naively, that if he were to ascend and become a god, he’d bring order and stability to the people, and lessen their suffering. 

It always starts with the best of intentions, doesn’t it?

Lagard, like the new gods and the fellowship before him, also wanted to ascend to godhood for to attempt to rival the power of the old gods.

While the new gods were humans that had touched the powers of the gods. The Old Gods were different, they were not born in this world, but they were part of the very fabric of existence. Creation, destruction, nature, the depths and Rher, the trickster God; they each represent basic concepts of existence. They also represented the targets for the ire of humanity for all of the plagues, famines, disasters, tragedies, and wars humanity has had to endure. Since the beginning of time, humans have been trying to find a way to end the chaos and bring order, and take power aways from the gods, and gain control over chaos.

But one of the new gods, Nilvan, was working on a secret scheme, another avenue of attack against the old gods. She would birth another ancient one, sired by Lagard, and birth another new god, that would be able to stand against the old ones; The god of Fear and Hunger

“A soul that radiates the light of an older god. The soul has formed itself inside the body of a little girl. The mother of the Ancient One is the Endless One and the father is the Man from the Prophecies. The results of such unholy union are unfamiliar to us.” – The New Gods when asked about the Ancient One.

One of the possible endings of Fear and Hunger 1 sees the birth and ascension of this new god, born of Lagard and Nilvan, with the ancient soul. The birth of the God of Fear and Hunger marked a new era for humanity…. The cruel age.

The rise of the cruel era

The Four Ages of History

The modern age and modern chronology begins from the birth of our lord, the ascended one, Alll-mer. … His birth would mark as the first age.

The second age started from the reign of the so-called New gods in the year 410. There are texts about different new gods prior to this event, and the concept did exist in ancient times as well, but this group of people included the famed warlord from the Eastern Sanctuaries, Nas’hrah the great. This alone made this group more distinguished compared to the ones that came before.

Their world order started a slow decline few hundred years after their deaths, only to be ended by “The fellowship” around year 800. The popular book ‘The Fellowship’ inspired the contemporary people of the time and lifted the four people of the fellowship – Francóis, Chambara, Nilvan and Valteil to a near god-like status.

Their age would last until the end of the 16th century. The western world was in a dark age at the time and out of nowhere appeared a new idol of worship, the god of Fear & Hunger. People forgot the teachings of the old in times of diseases and death and turned on to this new saviour. The appearance of the God of Fear & Hunger started the fourth age in which mankind had to learn to adapt and evolve. As times have progressed, we are still living according to this ideology.

Little is detailed about the cruel era in the games of Fear and Hunger 1 and 2. You don’t find many mentions of these 600 years, no entries in the books found around town. Almost as if humanity had decided to do it’s best to not remember these times.

What we do know is that Lagard was out there. Well… maybe not Legard as we know him, but rather the King in Yellow. Doing what he would do to further his goals, but whatever it was it was discreet since he seems to have stayed out of the history books.

During the cruel era, in response to famine, plague, disasters and other such tragedies, humanity was forced to evolve, to adapt. To understand the rules of the world and use them to humanity’s advantage. In order to bring order and stability out of chaos. Humanity developed science, technology, engineering.

Humanity, like Lagard, sought stability and order, this is how societies grow and thrive. So humanity built cities, machines, industry, factories, to make life a bit more manageable and easier. Maybe with these new tech tools, humanity would be able to wrestle control away from the gods and take control of its own destiny. Could technology be what humanity needed to finally be able to wage an assault on the old gods and take control of existence? Could sufficiently advanced technology and determined people be enough to challenge the very basic concepts of existence? 

Arrival at Prehevil

The game begins with a train traveling to Prehavil carrying our unlucky protagonists. The recently conquered capital of the region. The city that the Kaiser seems to have been solely focused on

One by one they fall asleep listening to the melodic repeating sounds of the train. They each have a nightmare, the same nightmare. A nightmare that included a masked man, who had also been showing up in the dreams of the locals for the last few weeks

Upon exploring the city, the player might find this flyer about the man in the dreams:

Have you seen this man in dreams?

Over the past week or so, since the full moon, people all over Prehevil and its neighbouring settlements see this face in their dreams, every night.

If you are one of them, or if you have any information that can help us identify this person, please contact us.

In the dream, this mysterious man, the moon’s jester, explains to our unlucky protagonists that they have been chosen to participate in the festival of Termina, by the trickster moon Rher. Today, there are 14 of them, in 3 days, there must only be one of them, and that survivor would be the winner of the festival of termina. If there were more than one still alive at the deadline, they would all die.

The participants wake up from the dream. The train is stopped outside the city and has been deserted, no evidence of the crew or anyone else in the area. Just a thick fog covering the woods on the outskirts of the city. The train won’t start and there is no obvious reason why, everything looks fine. How did they all have the same dream? Where was the crew of the train? Why couldn’t the train start? Why had they stopped short of their destination? The war was supposed to be over.

The participants realize they are walking distance from the city. At least the train had gotten them almost all the way there. The thick fog made it impossible to see more than a few meters, but they had enough visibility to one by one stumble into the city after fumbling thru the forest.

Though Prehevil is the regional capital, it’s an old and reclusive city. Slow to modernize, its inhabitants still adhere to the ancient traditions, practicing old and dark rituals to honor ancient deities; including human sacrifices. Prehevil was a medium sized town with a massive tower at its center. A tower that seemed important to the locals, though they wouldn’t talk to outsiders about it.

Prehevil document

…There has been settlement here for as long as the history books cover the area. It has always centered around the mysterious Hollow Tower that works as the central pillar of the community. The city flourished during the cruel age in the 1600s, but it quickly fell from prominence the closer we got to the modern times.

I understand the city is medium in size as far as cities in eastern Europa go, but still I find it hard to believe that this place would serve as a hub of any kind in a civilized world. For some reason the government officials insist that Prehevil keeps its capital identity despite it being one of the more remote and unwelcoming cities in all of Bohemia, if not all of Europa. The only explanation I can come up with is that the country is proud of the old archaic rites that still go down in this city and they want to show their full support.

If you were to visit Prehevil and sightsee its small center, you’d see glimpses of its ancient glory days, still well and alive in these modern times. Do not let the western style shopping district with its latest movie posters and advertisements fool you, the locals still worship the old world order in the dank and crumbling parts of the town. Ritualistic murder sites are just around the corner no matter where you are in the city.

While the churches look to be dedicated to our one true god Alll-mer from the outside, insides tell a whole different story. Ancient gods without name in any known language still linger in those crypts. And why wouldn’t they? You can hear the priests chant their masses in the moonlit alleys during the dead of the night. The whole wicked city is a playground for the ancient beings and the people living there offer themselves to the first taker without second thought.

Soldier’s diary 1

…

Frankly I’m baffled at how a city of this size has managed to stay so isolated from the neighbouring influences and modern times. The Prehevil folk still hold on tightly to religious rites as old as ‘The Fellowship’ itself. The human sacrifices creep me out in this day and age. Even if I’ve seen the horrors of war, the crucifixes set around the city manage to send a chill down my spine.

As the participants approach the city they very quickly realize something is gravely wrong. The woodmans is an obvious warning sign. As they approach the city, the remaining locals look distraught, transformed… burned? No…. radiated?? Poisoned? None of the above, they had been moonscorched.

Some of the non violents ones were pelling parts of themselves off. What was it? What happened here? An experiment? Was the entire city like this? What else did this thick fog hide?

The ones coherent enough to speak made a reference to being scorched… but by the moon? Was the moon responsible for the green hue to the fog at night?

Soldier’s letter

Dear Giesela,

I write this letter in great sadness. I’m afraid I will have to postpone my return to your loving bosom. Even if the great war is supposedly over, our tasks seem to be anything but.

After running around following orders that would sicken every sane person who had not witnessed the horrors of war, I think I’ve finally started to see the red line our Kaiser has been following all along. This rotten city… It was the very thing our Kaiser strived to conquer since day one. I do not think it a coincidence that very soon after reaching this city, the Kaiser decided to withdrawal Bremen forces elsewhere and agree on terms of peace.

I don’t know what’s so special about this miserable place, but I even heard that the Kaiser himself will be coming here in the upcoming days. Maybe after that, I can finally return home. I hope you are able to wait for me just a while longer.

Yours forever – Jonni.

So obviously the local population had suffered under the recent invasion and occupation by the Bremen Empire. Part of the city was demolished by combat and had been mined. Executed bodies in the city streets showed the handy work of the Bremen soldiers and the brutally visited upon the local population. Barricades prevented free movement on the main roads. All that aside, the brutality of the Bremen Empire didn’t explain the green fog at night, or what transformed the surviving locals, or what was driving the people to hyper violence and homicidal rage. The occupation didn’t explain why the locals had turned on each other.

There was something more at play than just some military occupation. Was the Kaiser really here? As rumors and intelligence reports suggested? Why would he be somewhere so dangerous? So close to the front lines? What caused these monsters to be roaming the street hunting the locals?

Exploring the city, restaurants, shops and apartments you catch glimpses of a city that once was, and is no longer. The echoes of the lives that once called this place home.

At different spots in and around the city. You keep finding these latches that lead to underground tunnels. Apparently when the Eastern Union had occupied the city, they had constructed a series of bunkers that criss-crossed the city. Why? Why invest so much in building these tunnels underneath this unremarkable city so far from the centers of power? Couldn’t the Eastern Union better spend its resources on the battlefield? And not digging underneath the city?

The City’s subsurface

Ok, so let’s go over how you discover the answers to these secrets in the game.

The game, like so many survival horrors, is a series of lock and key puzzles. A variation on you have to find x amount of keys to get past this point, move to another area and repeat. First you need the two keys to get into the city, if you don’t get in via the sewer or the path through the deep forest shortcut. Once in the city, you need to collect the three effigies hidden in the orphanage, the white mold apartments and underneath the Church of Allmer to get to the last endgame area

Just like the Police station puzzle in Resident evil two, once you have the three effigies, you can place them at the alter to unlock the path throu the mausoleum road and to the endgame areas which include the Museum and the tower

The game plays like a roguelike, expecting you will attempt various runs each time learning more about the world, events and game mechanics. You have three days until the festival of Termina ends, and all the surviving participants get moonscorched and turn into different types of abominations. Each day is divided up into three sections, day, afternoon and night, and time is advanced by saving the game.

That adds an extra layer of tension and strategy to the game, since you will only have 8 saves you can use by resting, and each time you save you have to ask yourself if you’ve done enough or if you want to risk it and press on. The more you can get done in between saves the more you buffer you buy yourself in the endgame. You don’t want to hit the evening of the third day and have to do multiple puzzles and lots of dangerous traveling before attempting the end game all without saving. And all this is besides wondering if it’s even safe to try to rest at any given bed.

If you try to rest on the evening of the last day, you’ll see your character transforming into a moonscortched creature and you lose the game.

So once you unlock the gate and the path at the Church of Allmer, you can go for one of the endings at the tower or the museum. If you’re the only surviving participants (not judging on how the others met their end), you’ll be allowed into the tower to confront Perkele and Rher to get the escape ending.

But, if you explored the bunkers underground and noticed the telectroscope stations connecting to the logic and activating them, you’ll be able to access the other ending at the white bunker, where the Kaiser is waiting. All three telectroscopes need to be activated across the map, one in the first bunker where Abella can be recruited, one past the sewer treatment puzzle and the Foundations of Decay, and the third in the bunker hidden in the deep forest

The game doesn’t explicitly tell you about how to unlock the blast door to the white bunker, like it explicitly told you about the keys to the gate to the city and the passage at the Church of Allmer. Though the game does strongly give you a hint by putting the first telectroscope at the very beginning of the game, with a critical item right in front of it, one of the two keys needed to get past the first gate. Expecting the player will notice it and start wondering what it is and what the Logic is.

So you’ve made your way to the museum, past the creepy party goers in their Venetian style maskes looking like a haunted mardi gras that I never want to go to. You’ve solved the astrological clock puzzle (that really resembles the astrological clock in Prague). You make your way to the secret excavation underneath the museum, and approach the blast door locking the white bunker. The last stop in your ordeal. One way of the other this chapter of the story is ending here.

So with all telectroscopes active, the blast door underneath the museum is activated and operational. We open the door and enter the endgame. Characters in your party note that it looks like the tunnel leading to the blast door had been blasted shut, sealed, and only just recently dug open again. An excavator nearby only drives home the suspicions that there had been a lot of recent work to clear up the path to the blast door.

The protagonists and anyone in the party unaware that one way or the other, even if they beat the Kaiser, they will never see the outside world again

Telectroscope and the logic

At this point we should take an aside to go over some late game findings that flesh out some details about this secret project being carried out underneath the city.

NLU Reconnaissance Report #2

Quick bullet points on the Bohemian sect member, Haas Reila Audrey:

– Born January 1st, 1922 (Current Age 20)

– Hair: Medium height, dark brown

– Eyes: Blue

– 132 IQ

– Relatives: Twin-sister – Olivia Haas, father – Franz Haas, mother – Ema Haas

– Shown to possess exceptionally high empathic traits

– Highly knowledgeable in New Sciences

– Started studies of New Sciences in Bremen in 1937

– Worked under a special scholarship in “Operation ein Geist”

– First confirmed contact with NLU

– Got an international scholarship in 1939

– The studies continue abroad in the Eastern Union

– Recruited for “Operation Logic” in Bohemia

– Promoted to the position of head-engineer in the operation

– Confirmed contact with NLU

– NLU contact person captured and executed

– Reila Haas arrested for a treason against the Empire

– Held at the East-Bremen for interrogations

– Information about the ‘Operation Logic’ gathered

– Reila Haas reported missing in East-Bremen State Prison

– NLU suspected to have aided her escape

– Suspected to work with Bohemian sect of NLU

– Possesses potential danger for “Operation ein Geist”

– Marked as “a Person of Special Interest” by Kaiser”

– Wanted: Alive

Reila Haas, that was the girl we’ve been having visions of. She’s the one that was placing butterflies to mark the way to the telectroscope stations to get us to power them up. Was she trying to get us to finish setting everything up for her final ascension to machine godhood?

Sister? Olivia? She was on the train and is one of the participants, the botanist. Seems like an inclination towards the sciences runs in the Haas family.

A quick aside, something I’ve noticed about the fear and hunger games, is the representation. In the first game, the character that fills the Knight archetype is a woman. In the second game, Abella is a Engineer, Olivia and Reila are scientists. Olivia is also disabled needing a wheelchair, not that it slows her down and she can be a very powerful character. Levi is a trauma victim and child soldier. Marina the badass is a transwoman. Marcoh is empathetic, contrary to his fighter archetype, Karin is a selfless activist. Camara in the first game is not at all possessive of his partner and goes to the dungeon trying to provide for his partner and unborn child. In fact, now that I think of it, all the playable characters in both games come off as pretty good, empathetic characters. What do you think? Let me know in the comments?

You press on. You fight your way through the elite of the Bremen Army protecting their leader of their empire.

Working your way through the white bunker, dodging THESE FUCKING INSTAHIT KILL ENEMIES THAT ARE ONLY JUST NOW BEING INTRODUCED. Just to remind you not to get too comfortable, in case you were feeling like a badass having made it this far

You discover what the telectroscope have been connected to… rows and rows of databanks and servers. The white bunker was in part a massive data storage facility that had been wired to the entire city.

You find a report:

Telelectroscope and Logic

Telelectroscope – An interconnected, computerized system which documents our lives and extracts information from our consciousness. The data is abstracted from banks of every person in the whole human system.

Logic – Logic works as the center of Telelectroscope. A core in this world where all of our knowledge and inspiration come from and go to. A data tank which possess all knowledge and it provides people with said information as they need it.

The future of telelectroscope – People become obsessed with these fake ‘friends’ who exist in the walls. Ultimately people will begin to shun personal contact, preferring to interact with each other via machine technology. People will rather stay in the world created by our shared consciousness. The logic is designed so that each individual human in the system will affect the surrounding world. Thus creating a shared paradise. A shared consensus.

So at long last we get a glimpse about what all of this is about… the kaiser and the Eastern Union had found something underneath Prehavil that would allow them to build a wonder machine, a super computer, a machine god. 

Lagard
“We cannot control the world laid down by primal forces, but we can build a new one. The Singularity, our personal promised land awaits”

Nasrah

But I can’t have a rectal extension like yourself leading us to jack shit

A god to turn to when guidance or direction was needed. That saw all, and knew all. But unlike the new or the old gods, this new machine god was built by humans, empowered by the sciences and technologies that humanity developed in response to the Cruel Age.

A weapon that the Kaiser, Legard, could use against the old gods, or the traces that remained of the old gods. He never waivered from his goal for more than 500 years. The Kaiser had invaded Prehavil, kidnapped Reila, and did who knows what to make her the new machine god. Was Lagard trying to be like Prometheus and steal something from the gods to give to humanity?

You fight the platoon and commander. You confront the kaiser and overcome him. Just in time to see the machine god take her true and final form as she came online. The culmination of the Kaiser’s plans

After a long, difficult fight, you manage to beat the machine god. Maybe deactivate her, but you lose consciousness and have a dream where you are in a green stream of consciousness, connected to everything and everyone, a global network for people, of humanity.

The machine god welcomes you to paradise, and the brave protagonists that entered the white bunker are never seen from again. Had they thwarted Lagard? Or merely delayed him? Had they actually defeat the machine god, or only delayed its ascension. Could humans ever dare take on the old gods, could humanity use science and technology to impose order on a chaotic world? Or were the old forces of chaos of the universe too much for humanity to be able to rival?

It’s hard not to think about analogies to where our society is, where soon most of us will never have known of a time when data was scarce and limited to books, and print media. Where it was normal to be completely separated from the global networks of communication for longs periods of time. Soon there will be no one left alive that can remember a time before faceless gods of the algorithm dictated so much about what we see, here, read and eventually think……

What will it mean for us to elevate these technologies that will be able to mimic the human brain and generate art, images, video and music that imitates human expression.

What will it mean that our new machine gods are able to provide for us things that we cannot distinguish from the real thing? What would be reality then? What will be the result of our embrace of virtual realities that only exists with computer networks? What will we lose?

When ideas and personalities can carry out completely synthetic lives on the global network?

Must we be careful with what we elevate to godhood?

As a mark of the times, I’m happy to let you know that none of this script is machine generated, if my grammar is shit, is because for once I didn’t use chat GPT to check my grammar. Just think it’s so crazy to think that human written text will be increasingly uncommon.

I for one welcome our robot overlords?