Hi everyone.
Our friends over at Maximum Entertainment are hosting a Myths & Legends Steam event running January 29 – February 4. Empyreal is taking part, and we encourage you to visit the sales page to discover a wide range of on-sale and upcoming games based on a variety of myths and legends: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/MythsandLegendsSales
How does Empyreal fit into the Myths & Legends topic? While the universe of Empyreal itself is not directly based on or related to a specific culture or mythology from history, when developing the world and narrative we drew heavily from classical and existentialist philosophy, theology, and history. There is one figure in particular who represents an important idea that permeates a core theme of our underlying narrative: the ancient Greek god, Dionysus.
Dionysus is typically portrayed as a drunken party animal in much of modern pop-culture media, but in his seminal work “Dionysus: Myth and Cult”, classical philologist Walter Otto paints a much more complete and complex picture.
While there is truth in Dionysus being the god of wine and the festival, he was also the god of madness and death. Although at first this may seem a perplexing juxtaposition, is there some truth we can learn from it? Otto claims that in “The visage of every true God is a visage of the World”. In other words, even in myth, we invariably find an accurate insight into the nature of the world.
In the case of Dionysus, he represents the paradox of duality. The understanding that life and death, madness and beauty and conflict and creativity are opposites, and yet also pre-requisites for each other. Embracing this paradox is a core philosophy behind Empyreal – to see the universe as both a “Mystic Temple and a Hall of Doom” (an idea introduced by Thomas Carlyle in his text, Characteristics) and to accept this dual nature in its totality. This life-affirming perspective is known as the “Tragic View”.
Empyreal does not feature an encroaching but ill-defined “darkness”, or a “corruption of the land”. Nor does it feature a pantomime villain of inexplicable evil for no other reason than to have an “evil antagonist”. Instead, the story and characters are designed to prompt careful reflection on the nature of humanity, our place in the universe and what it truly takes to guarantee the future of mankind.
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