Ultima Thule

Emerald Fish’s upcoming open-world release, Ultima Thule, has been shrouded in secrecy throughout its development. After years of speculation, a handful of reviewers were finally given early-access download codes last week. The studio is of course known for highly experimental games that occasionally border on the gimmicky, so we weren’t sure what to expect.

When this reviewer downloaded the game (which had a surprisingly small file size), I was taken to a title screen so dark that I had to double check the brightness levels on my TV. A grim mountain range barely visible through thrashing torrents of rain, with occasional bursts of lightning revealing unsettling shapes moving through the valleys. The title, Ultima Thule, slowly faded into existence, with Press Start below it. However, upon pressing that button, the game immediately reverted to an all-black screen and the controller was unresponsive. I assumed the console had crashed due to buggy software, but I was unable to restart.

Then, a few minutes later, I heard a knock at my door. When I answered, a man I’d never seen was standing there rigidly. He was nondescript, neither old nor young, neither handsome nor hideous, with a forgettable haircut. But he was wearing an extremely unforgettable outfit: a skintight black leotard with massive letters emblazoned across the chest in vivid crimson: ULTIMA THULE. Below that, in a smaller and less splashy font, were the following words: Say “Speak” to the Man to begin your personally tailored gaming experience.

I stared into the Man’s eyes, baffled. He said nothing, made no movements whatsoever. I asked him if this was some kind of guerrilla marketing campaign. No response. Finally I gave in and said, “Speak.”

The Man began to talk, still standing there in my doorway. I quickly began recording a new voice memo on my phone. He spoke rapidly, at first in a deadpan voice that grew increasingly bro-like as he warmed to his task, but he didn’t seem to be reciting a memorized script. His eyes were alive and flashing, darting all over my body from head to toe in an apparently nonsexual but nonetheless extremely unsettling manner, and occasionally glancing past me into my apartment. I got the impression I was being indexed, catalogued. This is what the Man said:

You start out in a dark mossy forest, alone. Everything kind of damp, the trees so thick you can’t really see the sky. Gloomy. No other characters, just your avatar exploring these black ancient woods. And there’s no linear direction at all, no indication of what you should do other than explore. No trails or paths, no text. Zero explanation of the controls, which are pretty simple. There are some deep hidden ravines you can fall into and die if you’re not careful, and some kind of stalking unseen beasts that’ll kill you if you stay in one place too long. You can pick up sticks or rocks to fight them, if you want, but you’re pretty underpowered at the beginning.

Eventually, no matter which direction you head, you start to find these burnt-out ruins, husks of buildings and of strange vehicles. And you find little bits of text: moldering books, rusted metal monuments, street signs. You can’t read any of it—the text is in some alien-looking alphabet. Your character records these bits of text in their journal but can’t understand them. You never encounter any people.

As you keep exploring, you find more ruins until it becomes clear that there was an entire city here, long destroyed and overgrown. Signs of violence: fire, etcetera, but also what look like huge claw marks, like something massive tore the city apart. Some kind of apocalypse.

The intrepid and overly anal explorer can discover, fairly early on, some busted tablets that they can, after also discovering batteries and spare parts, activate. Turns out the various tablets, twelve of them, are grammar texts that can help you translate the ancient language. But this is a secret path, strictly optional. You’ll eventually get another device that’ll translate all the text into English for you. Eventually. Those hardcore gamers who find the tablets can translate everything early, but only if they do the work themselves—the tablets don’t change the onscreen text to English like the later device will.

After several hours of exploring this depressing horror-forest and city ruins, you eventually crest a hill or mountain and suddenly come out into blazing sunlight, plus all these gorgeous yellow-leaved trees, and the sea stretches out in front of you. Rendered in truly asinine detail by the Unreal Engine. After all that darkness and gloom, you’re like, holy shit. You scramble down the hill to a beach with a kind of ruined observatory, a crumbling dome. You go inside. You’re just getting so fucking pumped right now.

Inside, after poking around and probably dying a few times from unstable rafters falling and impaling you, you find a hidden room in the basement. In the room is this elaborate golden clockwork mechanism. Looks kind of like an orrery or an antikythera device, which it was clearly based on. Some real Archimedes shit.

You see there are some obvious pieces missing. The game holds the player’s hand a teeny bit here, since there’s no text, so they’re big obvious holes with specific shapes. You hunt around the observatory and the beach outside till you find all five missing gears, one of which looks like a power source.

You fire it up, and everything changes. The whole game changes into a different type of game. You’re like, whoa.

The mechanism rolls back time. You watch as the dome and the other buildings of the city reconstruct themselves backward in time, slowly at first and then way quick, with a soaring soundtrack from up-and-coming electro-folk composer The Ditchman. Visit him at The Ditchman Dot Net.

The forest disappears, and you’re in this buzzing cyberpunk metropolis, neon lights everywhere, massive skyscrapers with holographic billboards. You finally meet other people for the first time. But they all speak that same weird language you can’t understand.

It’s a nocturnal city, and everyone sleeps during the day. Whole city shuts down at daybreak. Ghost town. Then comes back alive every night. The in-game day-night cycle is about two hours of real time. The name of the city is Thule.

You can fight people, if you want, and steal from their bodies these little glittering bricks you soon realize are money. Via gestures, you can trade them for food and weapons and potions and shit at shops.

Then, in a seedy punk bar, you find a device that’ll translate the language for you, and that’s when the real game starts. And you’re already 20 to 50 hours into playing at this point. Now it’s this noir mystery game where you try to uncover what happened to Thule, why it got destroyed in the past. To figure it out, you’ve got to cycle back and forth a bit using the time mechanism from the observatory, which is still hidden in that basement room that nobody in the city seems to know about. Now you can finally translate all that textual shit you found earlier, which you recorded in your journal. But there are areas in the city you can only access from the forest, in the future. Piecing together some instructions you find, you soon figure out how to take the essential pieces of the device and build a more portable version, so you can quickly shoot back and forth between past and future anywhere you like.

In the endgame, you figure out that some decadent rich dude who lives at the top of the tallest skyscraper in the city, he’s got this pet project where he creates these massive clockwork-and-neon automata to supposedly build new buildings and cities. Progress, etcetera. But of course, he has hubris. A dickload of it. And he fucks it up, big time, and the AI that runs the big robots freaks out and they kill everyone and destroy the city. So you’ve got to stop that, if you can. If you want. You can also hasten its destruction, or spread the destruction to the rest of the unnamed planet. There are twelve different endings possible. High replay value.

The end. Goodbye.

His recitation complete, the Man turned and sprinted away down the hall, startling me with his sudden movement. I tried chasing him, but I lost him in the stairwell. Downstairs, I asked my doorman which way the Man went, but he looked at me like I’d lost it. He didn’t recall seeing any strange men in leotards.

I have since heard from several other reviewers about their experiences with Ultima Thule, and it sounds like this same Man visited their homes. Impossibly, he always shows up minutes after the reviewer first loads up the game and presses Start. But the game he describes is wildly different for each person. Claire Espinosa over at Game Destroyer tells me the Man described to her a kind of horror platformer, where a small purple sprite leaps through an apocalyptic hellscape that rapidly shifts between 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, and full 3D, without warning or pattern. The sprite character’s name is Ultima, her surname Thule.

Jason Majors from Press A to Cry was instead given a turn-based RPG where the player character is a car mechanic and the “enemies” are a faulty spark plug, carburetor, water pump, and so on, each with its own hit points and special attacks. The car manufacturer is called Ultima; the car model is a Thule.

Madame Buttonmasher of The New York Review of Games tried to physically fight the Man after he described a kind of interactive visual novel that involved some deeply personal memories from her own past, where the player character could choose to make different decisions at certain crossroads, such as the death of her mother. As Madame is a famously and fiercely private pseudonymous reviewer who closely guards any facts about her own life, she was horrified at this incursion and took a swing at the Man before he’d even finished. He took the blow on the chin, didn’t raise his hands to defend himself, but seemingly didn’t feel the blow either. He kept right on talking. She attempted to kick him in the unmentionables [the balls –Ed.]; this at least provoked a response: He turned and evaded the blow, blocking her kick with a quick chop from one of his large square hands. He didn’t stop describing the game, didn’t even pause. Madame slammed the door in his face. Her phone rang immediately. She didn’t pick up. She could hear the hated voice, dull and muffled, continue its description outside her door, though she could no longer make out the details. She turned on some loud music to drown it out (Kraftwerk, she tells me, in an uncharacteristically personal moment). Apparently the Man left after finishing his spiel. She never saw him again. None of us did.

Emerald Fish has so far stayed silent on their unusual new “game.” Zero press releases, no response to our many emails and calls.

Later, I tried visiting the website the Man had mentioned: The Ditchman Dot Net, which he’d said was the homepage for some “up-and-coming electro-folk composer” who supposedly wrote the music for this nonexistent game. (Or is it nonexistent? In what sense is a game described verbally still a game, given the other bewildering circumstances surrounding its description?) I found only a blank green screen with a blinking cursor at the top. I tried typing and saw my words appear on the screen, so I asked: What the fuck is this?

The answer appeared on the screen moments later, letter by letter, as if someone was typing it live: This is Ultima Thule. Your game has only just begun.

Then my laptop speakers began playing this incredible music that I have tried and failed many times to accurately describe. Soaring, lonesome fiddle over some kind of deep buzzing synth. It seemed specifically tailored to my own tastes and memories. I found myself openly weeping. When the music ended, the screen turned black. I tried refreshing the site and saw the standard landing page from one of those companies that sell URLs, the kind of page you see when nobody owns the domain name.

Later still, I was walking to my kitchen for an ice cream and noticed someone had slipped an envelope under my front door. I opened it and found a card, thick black stationary, with a long series of numbers scrawled in opaque green gel pen. Some searching online revealed the numbers as latitude and longitude coordinates for what appeared to be a strange building deep in the northern Canadian wilderness, far from any towns or settlements. The map’s aerial image was blurry and indistinct, but the building looked like some kind of dome. Almost like a planetarium or orrery.

So I’ll be making the long trip up there this weekend. I can’t handle not knowing. I’ve bought a plane ticket to the nearest Canadian airport, some 400 miles from the coordinates, and I’ll rent a Jeep or something to make it the rest of the way. Will report back when I return. Wish me luck, dear readers.

[Ed. note: Our reviewer has now been missing for six months. He did not record the coordinates and was already gone immediately after filing this piece, so we have no idea where he traveled. His phone is disconnected. The critics Claire Espinosa, Jason Majors, and Madame Buttonmasher are also reportedly missing. If any reader has any information about their whereabouts, please contact us immediately.]