Horror Games: Parasite Eve

     A few weeks ago my partner and I finished playing Parasite Eve, a game close to her heart but one I'd never tried. I had a vague idea of what it was like - a survival horror game with RPG elements - and the basics of the plot - an outbreak of 'intelligent' mitochondria taking over the humans that carry them. I admit that the latter was a thing that had put me off the game previously; 'but that's just not how mitochondria work', I had scoffed, essentially. But that simplistic dismissal of the game had kept me from a horror experience that I'm still thinking about now.

    Parasite Eve is the story of Aya, a NYPD officer who, in the game's dramatic opening sequence, is attending the opera on a date. At the crescendo of the performance, a singer who calls herself 'Eve' - a reference to the famed mitochondrial Eve that the game later makes explicit - causes the spontaneous combustion first of the rest of the cast, and then nearly the entire audience. Eve's powers arise from the mitochondria existing within human cells, whose relationship with us is not as symbiotic as we assume. Eve is capable of inciting mitochondria within living things to not only burn them but also mutate them, control them and just reduce them to disgusting goop. As the game progresses and Aya begins to develop similar powers, we learn not just of Eve's plans to create an 'Ultimate Being' and free the mitochondria from their servitude to humans and other creatures, but of Aya's relationship to Eve and the experiments that created her.

    To call Parasite Eve cosmic horror might not, on the surface, seem fitting. The game doesn't have the oh-so-familiar trappings of the most well-known examples of the genre; there are no tentacled gods from beyond the stars or fanatical yet doomed cultists here. But the core element of cosmic horror, to me, is that it derives horror from an understanding of the universe as vast and uncaring, and humans as a tiny and insignificant element of it. In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Ligotti writes that 'We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe.' That impression of humans as simply carriers of genetic information, our passions, minds, and dreams - our very selves - simply emergent, even accidental accessories to this unthinking biological process, is something I felt strongly as we played through Parasite Eve. Pushing further, there are elements in the game which portray human existence as not in fact merely insignificant but in fact actively malignant - another idea that dovetails with Ligotti's work. At the climax of the game, Maeda, Aya's awkward and superstitious scientist ally, opines that 

    'If the earth is a single human being, we humans that invade the earth become like viruses out of control. We, in essence, are upsetting the natural balance of the body. This is definitely... utter destruction. You see... humans are, in essence... parasites... You can say that we are parasites and the world is our host' 

    But the other side of the coin is that in Parasite Eve it is not the genes that are the driving force, but the mitochondria. This blends cosmic horror with the genre that is most clear in the game from its portrayals of mutation and transformation, visceral even today - body horror.

    Cosmic horror as a genre has always taken cues from the scientific discoveries that reorient what we 'know' about the universe and humanity's place in it. Caitlin R. Kiernan has written eloquently on how Lovecraft's stories drew on contemporary discoveries about the age of the Earth and life on it. Similarly, Parasite Eve takes its sense of alienation from the idea that mitochondria - necessary to the functioning of our bodies - likely originated as external entities and have their own genome. This concept that there is something within our very cells which is in a sense utterly alien to us evokes, to me, a similar sense of nameless dread as thinking about the smallness of humanity against the enormity of the universe. It raises similar existential questions - the ones raised directly by the game such as whether we or they are the parasites, we or they the servants - lead into questions of why are we here, what is it all for? Is there any meaningful answer at all? This sense of alienation escalates throughout the game, Aya's growing sense that she does not understand her own body mirrored by a busy and bright Christmastime New York being evacuated until only a handful of people are left, fighting monsters on streets empty of everything but endless snow. Which isn't to say that there isn't plenty of grotesquerie too - those monsters are truly something to see. Aside from one or two they are for the most part both disgusting and believable - bodies swelling and bones reorienting revoltingly, giving a genuine sense of growth and cell replication that is as catastrophic to the creature itself as to Aya and her friends. This further reinforces the bio-horror element of the game and, as mentioned above, really holds up despite the game's age.

    Playing Parasite Eve has really made me rue my past snobbery and I'm glad I was persuaded to play it now. I can understand why it has such a devoted following and it's certainly given me a lot to think about.  I'm no biochemist but it does seem like the game's understanding of mitochondria and evolutionary history is a little muddied; however to look at it like that is somewhat missing the point.