The Ascent is a cyberpunk action rpg that puts you in the role of an indent, someone who is effectively owned by a corporation and in this instance, the biggest corporation of them all: The Ascent Group. The game isn’t extremely long, but the world’s lore is very deep and quite interesting. For those of you who haven’t played and don’t want spoilers, I suggest you stop reading now.
The Story of The Ascent
So the player, as the indent, is tasked by Poone who is sort of the stack boss of the area to help bring sanity to their level by doing various miscellaneous tasks. The AGI, an Artificial General Intelligence, owned by The Ascent Group becomes non-responsive forcing the Ascent Group into bankruptcy. This results in the eventual corporate takeover by yCorp, which enlists the indents help to find out what happened to the AGI and bring it back online.
Many adventures occur and the indent finally reaches the board room, which is sealed and discovers that the AGI owned by The Ascent Group is offline and needs to be rebooted. Once rebooted, the AGI informs Kira from yCorp and the indent that the CTO Dakyne had attempted to imprint on the AGI which has corrupted it.
The Ending Explained
At this point Project MenShen is uncovered, which is a secret program to develop a wormhole. CTO Dakyne had basically decided to kill the board (due to the fact she was one of the last two Humans on the board and the rest were Aphoran) and takeover the AGI for herself. That failed, but she continued to work on the wormhole project.
The indent arrives when the wormhole is activated, with some space terror coming through the portal. The indent stops it and then you’re hit with some hard truths: The AGI will take a very long time to repair, The Ascent Group board and the corporation is pretty much done with and yCorp will be the replacement although it was originally designed as a failsafe for The Ascent Group in the event that The Ascent Group’s AGI went down.
So that leaves you with basically that, nothing changes and you’re placed in what’s effective a “New Game +” mode where you have all your stuff and can explore the entire world that’s open.
The ending doesn’t really leave much finished, with what seems like plenty of room for DLC and/or a sequel. The Ascent Group’s collapse remains… collapsed. yCorp seems to have taken control of all of the property so really they’re basically in charge with what we would assume Kira being at the head. Thanks to the work of the ident and yCorp security forces, the Archeology holds together and life continues to move on.
There’s a lot of unanswered questions about the wormhole, being introduced very late in the game. There isn’t a ton of details on the monster or if they can restore the AGI. The indent is free, so the main character can now do whatever the work they want to and that’s… about it.
So if you beat the game and sat there going well that seems… simple, it kind of was. That’s my take on it anyway.
