itch.io

Ok, so here's some (spoiler) lore which I had planned before starting the work on this game. 

The machine as referred to the black and white 'human like' face, is an entity that is guarding 'the wall' (The gate with 'danger, do not enter' sign in the last level). The reason the word 'wall' is used in the intro dialogue is because instead of just force fields, there were also supposed to be destructible walls that were going to be added to the game.  

The player / the plug (or the bot, as you refer to it) is actually a few surviving human organs inside a completely mechanical body, and the body is a battery that powers the force fields when connected to its sockets (as you see the other 'plugs' at the force fields). The player has travelled far distance to reach this wall as he has heard there are humans beyond the wall. Now wherever the player has originated from, severely lacks any human elements (likely possible that the player has escaped some industrial facility).

In the final level, the player powers down the force fields and the defense systems that prevent it from 'crossing the wall' to meet other humans (hopefully, if any exist, as he has heard). Upon that, the machine (not knowing that the player is actually a cyborg(part human, part machine) asks why did he not connect to the force fields as he is a prototype of advanced generation of plug and is programmed to power its defenses only. (the previous generations of plugs being fully mechanical unable to move and easily destroyed as seen in the game) ... The player's reply implies that he is not a robot that will merely carry out a task he is programmed to do, and is a human that seeks connection with other humans. 

The confusion might stem from the fact  that the only human character (player) in the game looks completely mechanical and fully identical to other machines in the game whereas the only 'human resembling' element (the machine's face, and its voices) are mere illusions of human behavior and has no relations to humans at all. The reason it was designed that way was for some world building about how much of human elements have been taken over by the machines in the universe of this game. 

For this reason, all the text in the game uses 'press start 2p' font signifying everything is being run by the machine, except the dialogue in the intro and second line of the ending where the camera zooms at the player character, those two lines use 'comic relief' font (a font that does not look like it is from a machine, but rather human like) .. which I thought would show a differentiation between the player and overall game world.  

I was going to add comic strips style intro and exit where the player / the plug is seen with half destroyed head with some flesh popping out, but this would have required more time, plus I found scripting the cutscenes easier. One other reason I avoided it was because it was recommended in the stream to not include elements like adult themes or gore at extremes, so completely avoided that. 

Now this lore certainly creates more questions like how did the player originate, escape, acquire weapons, etc. But that is a matter of lore expansion or world building. For the game, the core theme was how to focus on connection. Which incorporates both, electric connections (the plug powering the force fields and powering down the machine entity when destroyed) and the player seeking human connections. 

Like the conversation with other players on this thread points out, the game was inspired by older games such as half life, doom, system shock, etc. that (partially and sometimes fully) explore the relations between humans and the unknown, hence not much backstory is provided about the world and the existing cutscenes only show the player and their motif in the game world. 

I do think I can still improve on narrative design on my future games, as this is my first attempt at making scripted cutscenes in the game. Thank you for delving deeper into this.