Mythology and science fiction are usually treated as opposites: one looks backwards at gods, the other forwards at machines. Many games borrow a name from each column and call the result “world building”. Simply naming a spaceship Icarus is not a fusion of anything.
The games below go the extra mile. In each of them, the myth is the whole point. Gods run on hardware, and the ancient stories turn out to have described engineering all along. These games put pantheon and technology in the same box, and several of them are a lot weirder than you might think at first glance.
10
Asura's Wrath
Mantra is the source of energy that keeps the Asura gods in business, and it is harvested from human souls. That single design decision turns the Shinkoku pantheon into an extractive industry with a supply chain, giving a Hindu-Buddhist cosmology the moral form of a fossil fuel company.
Asura is one of eight Guardian generals cast out of the sky and spends the game fighting back through former colleagues commanding warships the size of moons. The game presents everything like an anime series, complete with episode breaks and a card to continue.
9
Deus Ex
Two artificial intelligences drive the plot, and Ion Storm named them after a father and a son. Daedalus built the labyrinth. Icarus was specially designed to hunt Daedalus. When the pair come together, the result is called Helios, in other words the sun, which is what killed Icarus in the original story.
A myth of hubris is revived by software that never once mentions its source material. The title provides the other half of the joke, as the deus ex machina is literally the god who descends from the machinery to resolve an end that no one has earned. Twenty-six years later, the final choice still has more thought behind it than most modern endings.
8
Zone Of The Enders: The 2nd Runner
Zone of the Enders has two orbital frames of note: Jehuty and Anubis, named after two gods in Egyptian mythology. Everyone knows about Anubis, but I would think that fewer know that Jehuty (or Djehuty rather) is Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom. Thoth recorded the judgment by the weighing of the heart, Anubis worked the scales.
The whole game is the features pointing at each other across Jupiter's moons at ridiculous speed, controlled by an ice miner who wants no part of it. Thematically, it's a pretty good mix of myth and science.
7
Kid Icarus: Rebellion
Pit cannot fly on its own. Palutena gives him five minutes at a time, after which his wings burn, and divine aid arrives implemented as a cooldown timer. The series' revival on 3DS devotes its opening hours to standard Greek business, with Medusa restored and a war for the underworld, then drops a mechanical alien hive called the Aurum into its center.
Seeing a pantheon confront a problem for which its mythology has no vocabulary is the best joke in the game. Also, loot is randomized, so the blacksmith god Dyntos actually runs a stat-rolling service, so that counts for something.
6
Final Fantasy 8
Guardian Forces are installed rather than bound spiritually to a person in Final Fantasy 8. Junctioning binds Shiva or Bahamut to a character's nervous system to unlock stat bonuses and magical abilities, and the game directly states that heavy use costs the user their memories. It's a magic system that, in grand Final Fantasy tradition, is expansive and well-developed.
Around it is the most science-fiction world the series has ever built (yes, even more so than Final Fantasy 7), from the hidden technocratic superpower Esthar to a spaceship named after the Norse apocalypse. Squaresoft turned divinity into firmware with an ongoing cost, and no other Final Fantasy has committed to the idea half as hard.
5
Change
Arkane put an automaton and a Greek monster in the same sentence: Talos was a bronze giant built to patrol a coastline, animated by fluid held in by a single sealed plug, Typhon was Gaia's youngest child and the father of every monster worth naming.
Prey drops you off at a station called Talos I, overrun by shape-shifting Typhon, playing a protagonist whose personality has been installed and wiped out enough times that the automaton question stops being decorative. The names there do a ton of thematic work while hitting a coffee mug with a wrench.
4
Enslaved: Odyssey To The West
Ninja Theory kept the furniture from Journey to the West and rebuilt each part as equipment. Tripitaka becomes Trip, a survivor who fits Monkey with a headband salvaged from a crashed slave ship – the golden circlet, now a shock collar connected to her pulse. The somersault cloud returns as a hovering disc he rides while dodging fire from abandoned war machines.
Sun Wukong's punishment under a mountain becomes a two-hander through an overgrown, depopulated America, with Andy Serkis in the capture suit and Alex Garland on the script. The PC port was filthy and always has been; the adaptation below it is unusually sharp, and nothing since has managed the same trick with the source.
3
Assassin's Creed Odyssey
AC's answer to where the Olympians came from is that they were an earlier civilization with better engineering. Hardly a new idea, although Odyssey commits harder than most. The Fate of Atlantis expansion sends Kassandra into Elysium and the Underworld, revealing both to be engineered environments, administered by Isu with names like Persephone and Hades.
Poseidon ran Atlantis as a management experiment that came from him. The Staff of Hermes Trismegistus turns out to be a battery that stops its holder from aging. Towards the end, the pantheon resembles a management structure that lost control of its own facilities, which is a grimmer reading of Greek myth than the source material tends to get.
2
Soul Hackers 2
The god that matters here is not on the demon list. Aion is one artificial intelligence formed from accumulated data from the network, which calculates that the world will end shortly and spins two agents to stop it. Ringo is one of them, and she resurrects the recently dead by hacking into their souls.
Everything else runs on standard Devil Summoner shtick, with deities from a half-dozen pantheons negotiated with and archived as summonable assets. Atlus even named his machine god after a Gnostic aeon. Honestly, I could have written about basically any of the Persona/SMT games here, but Soul Hackers 2 is what screams sci-fi/mythology maship.
1
The Talos Principle 2
Croteam built a puzzle series around a machine named after a myth about a machine. For the second time in this article: Talos was the bronze automaton of Crete, like the player character too ismore or less. In the first game, a voice calling itself Elohim – the Hebrew plural used for gods – gives instructions and forbids a particular tower, an arrangement that historically only goes one way.
The sequel opens in a robotic city called New Jerusalem, humanity long extinct, its followers arguing over whether curiosity is worth the cost. The puzzles are largely there to give you something to do between arguments about whether any of it counts. Fun? Yes, surprisingly.
