Absolutely phenomenal quest, well done DE

[ExaltedZoro]

This quest made me feel emotions deeper than I've felt in a long time. After this I feel the Stalker is a much deeper character that we can actually root for now and it was fantastic setup for future events involving him. Now, I did deduce beforehand that Jade was his dying wife but a child was certainly not on my bingo card. I'm going to try and keep this succinct and vaguely structured but forgive me if I end up rambling a bit.

As always, the art and sound team have done a fantastic job. The set pieces were beautiful and the music added to the experience so much, especially the cease fire scene. Stalkers lair looked exactly how I would expect from him.

Going on from previous quests, I'm loving seeing a return to the deeply personal and human stories that DE is so good at telling. The big story quests of recent years (New War, Angels of the Zariman, Whispers in the Walls etc) have had a lot more to do with setting up the future big bad (which I don't have a problem with) and it's lovely seeing a quest that isn't too dissimilar to the Sacrifice in terms of the themes presented. Seeing Stalker desperately trying to help Jade while at the same time being too proud to ask us for help was heartbreaking but at the same time it's beautiful that DE has given him a way to reclaim some of his humanity that he's lost so much of over the centuries(?) by becoming a father.

Now, I've seen some people saying that the cease fire scene was breaking established lore about the Corpus, but I thought it was a good kind of lore breaking. We've already seen a Corpus member actively going against orders/doctrines for the sake of morals (Veso in the New War). So having an aspiring Sister hearing the child and immediately calling a cease fire was so powerful as a way of showing that the Corpus aren't all bad and that they're still human, even if the high ranking officials left their humanity behind a long time ago for the sake of profit. Xeto almost certainly lost her job or at the least any chance at promotion after the higher ups realised what had happened, but I respect her massively for what she did. This whole scene made me bawl my eyes out, even as a young man with absolutely no experience being a parent.

Overall, a fantastic look into Stalkers history and a great setup for future events. Well done, DE.

 

Now for the one negative thing I do want to echo from a couple other posts. The trigger warning at the beginning is a great addition in making it accessible, however this story is very very heavy on themes that can bring up severe trauma for a select group of people that may mean they aren't able to actually play the quest properly. And given that I'm assuming this is going to be a mandatory quest at some point in the future, that may become a problem as they won't then be able to progress. While I appreciate that it is a small amount of people, it's probably still worth looking into some way of bypassing the quest so that those people can continue with the rest of the story and indeed the rest of the game.