GAMING | RETROSPECTIVE

Turn It Back On — Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and the Many Shapes of a Cage

A headband, a walled village, and a simulated paradise all promise the same thing: stay inside, and you get to keep living.

There’s a scene early in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West where a woman looks at a fish tank and calls it a miracle. The tank has survived years without anyone tending it, plants feeding fish, fish feeding bigger fish, the bigger fish dying and feeding the plants again. A closed loop, self-sufficient, untouched by the ruined city around it. “It’s marvelous,” she says, “that these fish have survived with no maintenance.” Then she compares it to her own home. Her village has learned to need nothing from the outside world either.

I didn’t think much of that scene the first time I played Enslaved, back when people mostly described it as pretty, undercooked, and easy to miss. Coming back to it now, the fish tank feels like the whole essay compressed into one moment. Enslaved keeps circling systems that keep something alive by keeping it contained: a slave headband, a self-sufficient village, a virtual paradise built inside a pyramid. It never quite settles whether containment and care are separate things or just two names for the same arrangement.

Ninja Theory made Enslaved on roughly two-thirds the budget of their previous game, Heavenly Sword, after Sony’s ownership of that game’s engine and technology forced them to find a new publisher and start over. What eventually got greenlit, with Andy Serkis, already known for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, performing the lead, and Alex Garland, the screenwriter behind 28 Days Later, co-writing and co-designing from the earliest stages, is a loose science-fiction retelling of Journey to the West, the sixteenth-century Chinese novel about a monk and his companions, including a rebellious monkey king, traveling west to retrieve sacred Buddhist scriptures. It’s the same source material behind the more recent action game Black Myth: Wukong, though that game sticks much closer to the original story than Enslaved ever tries to. Ninja Theory’s version is set a century and a half after a war that left robotic “mechs” roaming a rewilded America.

Critics were mostly positive on it. Players didn’t buy it in the numbers Namco Bandai needed. By the time real sales figures replaced shipped-units estimates, the total had settled around 730,000 worldwide, and a planned sequel died along with it. Tameem Antoniades later said he wasn’t sure if the fantasy setting turned people off, or the gameplay mix, or simple bad timing in a crowded release window. Years afterward, he also compared the game’s premise unfavorably to Horizon Zero Dawn, a game that took the tech-savvy-woman-and-post-apocalyptic-machines idea further than Enslaved’s budget ever let it go.

None of that commercial history is really why the game stuck around in people’s memory, though. What stuck was Monkey and Trip, and the thing bolted to Monkey’s skull.

The Headband Was the Honest One

The setup is almost aggressively simple. Monkey wakes up on a slave ship already bound for the pyramid, though neither he nor the player knows that yet. He escapes as the ship crashes and gets left behind by a stranger named Trip, who steals the final escape pod without him. When he catches up to her on the ground, she’s already fitted him with a “slave headband,” hacked to obey her voice and wired to her own heartbeat, so that if she dies, he dies too. “I said get me home, I’ll set you free,” she tells him later. “I guess I lied.”

It’s a blunt piece of machinery, narratively speaking, and that seems to be the point. Where the village and the pyramid dress up control as self-sufficiency or salvation, the headband never pretends to be anything else. It’s coercion with a kill switch, and both characters know it going in. Monkey resents it openly for most of the game’s opening hours, while Trip apologizes for it and keeps it on anyway, because she needs him and has no better tool.

What makes the relationship worth writing about isn’t the coercion itself. It’s what happens once the coercion stops being necessary and Monkey doesn’t ask for it to end. Two-thirds of the way through the game, aboard the Leviathan, the giant mech they’ve commandeered to reach the pyramid, Trip finally deactivates the headband and admits she was wrong to have used it. Monkey doesn’t respond with relief. He asks her to turn it back on.

Read one way, that’s the story cashing in its romance, the captive choosing to stay because the bond became real. Read another way, it’s the moment the game quietly admits the headband was never fully separable from whatever affection grew alongside it, since Monkey doesn’t ask her to trust him without it, he asks for the leash back and calls it loyalty. The game doesn’t resolve that tension so much as keep returning to it, the way it keeps returning to the fish tank.

It matters, too, that this reading doesn’t require making Trip secretly villainous or Monkey secretly deluded. She isn’t a captor who repents into a love interest so much as a frightened, resourceful teenager who used the only leverage she had and never fully let go of it, even once she no longer needed to. He isn’t a victim who simply forgives his abuser either; he’s someone who found, inside a device built to control him, the first relationship of his adult life worth protecting. Both things can be true at once, and Enslaved seems content to let them sit that way rather than pick one.

That ambiguity wasn’t an accident of the writing process. Trip was deliberately kept non-playable, and creative director Tameem Antoniades said the choice was meant to raise a harder question than the plot alone poses: whether a player can form a genuine emotional bond with a character who, by design, isn’t real. The headband, in that light, isn’t just a plot device forcing two strangers together. It’s the game asking whether the bond it’s building between Monkey and Trip, and by extension between the player and Trip, can be trusted at all.

The Fish Tank Had a Bigger Cousin

Trip’s village runs on the same logic as her fish tank, just at human scale. A community that walled itself off and built everything it needed inside those walls, so it would never have to depend on, or risk, the wasteland outside. The early fish tank scene frames that as something admirable, proof that a closed system can sustain life indefinitely. A few scenes later, though, it’s also revealed as exactly what left the village unable to survive contact with the outside world when the slavers finally found it. Self-sufficiency and vulnerability turn out to be built from the same wall, just viewed from opposite sides of it.

Pyramid, the man who names both himself and the structure he controls, built the same kind of wall at a civilizational scale and dressed it in gentler language. It’s also, it turns out, the exact destination that slave ship was hauling Monkey toward back in the opening minutes of the game, the cage he escaped once already without ever knowing its name. By the time Monkey and Trip reach him, he’s the last person alive who remembers the world before the war, and he’s spent that knowledge keeping a population of enslaved humans wired into a shared simulation of it. He genuinely believes he’s offering the people in his care solace from a planet that no longer has any use for them, and there’s no real evidence in the game that he’s lying about that belief. He’s simply built the fish tank one size larger and populated it with people instead of fish: a closed loop that sustains its inhabitants by making sure none of them ever try to leave.

Monkey, who’s been catching glimpses of Pyramid’s world through the headband’s glitches for most of the journey, finally puts on the mask himself and sees the whole thing. He calls it beautiful, and it visibly overtakes him. Trip’s reaction runs the other way. She rips out the wiring, kills Pyramid, and shuts the system down, waking thousands of enslaved people into a wasteland with no infrastructure and no plan.

Afterward, she turns to Monkey and asks if she did the right thing, and the game never really answers her. It’s tempting to read that ending the way audiences have learned to read a shut-down-the-simulation ending since The Matrix took hold of the cultural imagination, where waking up is treated as the obvious moral high ground and the simulation is always the lie worth escaping. But Enslaved has already spent an entire game showing that the walled village which shaped Trip’s own values ran on the exact same trade Pyramid was offering: safety purchased with dependency, life sustained by never testing its limits. She isn’t so much choosing reality over illusion as choosing one closed system’s failure over another system’s continuation, and calling that choice justice partly because it’s also the one that lets her keep the person she’s grown to need.

That’s the pattern Enslaved keeps returning to at different scales, whether the container in question is a headband, a wall, or a mask. The game never really tells you which of these containments count as love and which count as captivity, mostly because it doesn’t seem to think that’s a question with one stable answer. A fish tank can be a genuine miracle of self-sufficiency right up until something bigger than the glass comes looking for what’s inside it.

I think about that fish tank scene more than almost anything else in the game these days. Trip calls it marvelous because it needed nothing from anyone to keep living. A few minutes of gameplay later, a mech smashes straight through the glass, and she never uses that word again.