Zenith Into Maronarium

Zenith Into Maronarium is the fifth title in the Samozbor series, and is one of the most fascinating entries in the series. The Samozbor Empire, former Russian rebels who evacuated to another dimension, have begun a devastating assault on Earth and the only hope left is the survival of a pilot in her Kotel One. Episode 1, you take to the skies and shoot down an alien menace, while intermittently exploring cave systems armed only with a rake. You successfully shoot down the alien queen and her envoy, only to crash your own plane and scramble into a featureless landscape for help. In Episode 2, you must traverse a series of platforming obstacles on foot in order to obtain a working ship and kill another member of the Samozbor forces, the one known as Winged Doom. Winged Doom appears to be a satanic creature, but in Episode 3, you are shot down once again while attempting to bring the entity known as Winged Doom under your command and hopefully swing the tide of the war in your favor. In addition to all of this is the option to play the Orika Protocol from the Options menu, which appears to be a training module/brainwashing system. In it, you play as the dev's mascot character Kotel in a clone of a Mario game but with more difficult movement, a more distressing aesthetic and what sounds like the Pilot sing-talking in Russian. The difficulty in each chapter ranges from trivial to patently unfair, but the efforts to move the Pilot are hampered both by an exceedingly glitchy interface and persistent chatter from an HQ that appear to be having several unrelated conversations. Every chapter you play has you only take one hit point of damage before dying, including the ship sections, and they all open with a scene of the Pilot in some sort of physical or mental distress. These elements all add up to a specific commentary on the senselessness of the conflict being presented, but in a way vastly different from how other war games illustrate their point. Any delusion of a power fantasy vanishes instantly once you realize a single enemy bullet rips through your ship like paper. This particular game is one that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since playing it!