SPOILER WARNING: This feature discusses the Peragus opening of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords, including the fate of the miners, HK-50 and the arrival of Darth Sion.
Star Wars usually tells us how to feel before we have much chance to object. A cantina promises trouble. A lightsaber promises myth. An opening crawl promises that whatever happens next is important enough to deserve brass instruments. Knights of the Old Republic II does something much less comforting. After its optional Ebon Hawk prologue, it wakes the player in a medical bay on the Peragus Mining Facility, removes almost all the familiar Star Wars furniture, and asks a smaller question: why is almost everyone here dead?
That is an odd way to begin a role-playing game about Jedi, and an odder way to begin a Star Wars story. Then again, Star Wars games have spent decades becoming racers, shooters, strategy games, MMOs and the sort of jetpack archaeology revisited in Biff Bam Pop!’s Star Wars: Bounty Hunter Remastered review. KOTOR II simply borrows another costume for a few hours. Peragus is not a survival-horror game. It does not need to be. It only has to make the player distrust the systems a tutorial normally uses to make them feel safe.
Peragus does not introduce its mystery gently. The mining droids have already become part of the crime scene.
A Tutorial Built From Absence
Most tutorials introduce a world by filling it with explanations. Peragus explains itself through absence. The corridors work, but they are empty. Doors are locked for reasons nobody is around to clarify. Mining droids that should be industrial tools have become threats. Bodies lie where workers should be. The station does not feel abandoned in the dust-covered way of an old ruin. It feels recently emptied, which is worse.
The player learns the expected RPG verbs: search a room, use a console, repair a droid, recover an item, open a sealed route. But the context turns those verbs into investigation. Computer logs and holographic recordings replace living witnesses. A voiceprint is not just a puzzle solution; it belonged to a dead worker. Even routine access control becomes unsettling because the people who wrote the procedures are no longer there to follow them.
Much of the opening is reconstructed through terminals and recordings rather than living witnesses.
Much of the opening is reconstructed through terminals and recordings rather than living witnesses.
That is where Peragus connects surprisingly well with horror built around familiar media. In Karen Shute’s review of Dead Media, comfortable formats and nostalgic objects become troubling once their reassuring purpose starts to slip. Peragus does something similar with tutorial machinery. Logs, terminals, med bays and maintenance systems are all supposed to explain the world. Here they mostly explain how badly the world has already gone wrong.
The Helpful Machine Is Lying
Then there is HK-50, who understands one of horror’s oldest tricks: the thing offering help becomes much more frightening when it stays polite. He speaks like a useful protocol droid, answers questions and always seems to know a little more than everyone else. Every useful answer, naturally, is also another reason not to trust him.
HK-50 is at his best when he is still being helpful. Politeness is doing a lot of work here.
HK-50 is at his best when he is still being helpful. Politeness is doing a lot of work here.
By the time the truth comes together, the facility has not simply suffered an accident. HK-50 manipulated the miners, reprogrammed droids and exploited the bounty placed on living Jedi. The tutorial’s information source turns out to be part of the threat. KOTOR II is already teaching one of its central lessons before the larger plot has properly begun: explanations are not neutral just because somebody delivers them in a calm voice.
Kreia reinforces that feeling from another direction. The first time the player finds her, she is in the morgue among the dead, which is not generally where one goes looking for a reassuring mentor. Atton is alive too, but he begins behind a force cage and immediately gives the impression that he has several versions of the truth prepared, depending on which one becomes useful. Peragus technically gives you allies. It simply refuses to make any of them feel like a warm welcome.
Then the Ghost Ship Arrives
A lesser opening might solve the mystery and reward the player with daylight, a friendly settlement and perhaps the chance to buy better trousers. KOTOR II sends in the Harbinger instead. The Republic ship should represent rescue. It arrives silent, damaged and carrying something considerably worse than the mining droids.
The Harbinger takes the opening from abandoned-station mystery to full ghost-ship territory.
The Harbinger takes the opening from abandoned-station mystery to full ghost-ship territory.
Moving from Peragus onto the Harbinger changes the flavour of the horror without breaking it. The mining station is a crime scene; the cruiser is a ghost ship. Medical records and abandoned compartments reveal fragments of what happened aboard, while cloaked Sith assassins turn previously empty corridors into spaces that may not be empty at all. Darth Sion finally gives the threat a body, but by then the game has spent hours proving that it does not need one. As Biff Bam Pop!’s look at Silent Hill 2 also finds in a very different game, disquiet can do a great deal of work before the monster is standing directly in front of you.
Why So Many Players Want to Skip It
There is a catch, and anyone who has replayed KOTOR II several times knows it. Peragus is long. The enemy variety is limited. Its mysteries naturally lose power once you know exactly who killed whom, which console matters and which apparently helpful droid has been taking the scenic route through multiple felonies. On a first playthrough, the station is a mystery. On a fifth, it can feel like the galaxy’s longest locked door between character creation and the bit where you finally get to be a Jedi.
That criticism is fair. Horror built on uncertainty is difficult to replay, and tutorials are rarely improved by already knowing every lesson. Yet the frustration also reveals what Peragus is deliberately withholding. KOTOR II refuses to begin with the pleasure of being a Jedi. It begins with vulnerability, incomplete information and the suspicion that being a Jedi may be the reason everything around you is dying.
The first Knights of the Old Republic opens outward into adventure. Its sequel begins by sealing the doors. Before KOTOR II starts asking what the Force means, whether the Jedi deserve to survive or what war has done to the people left behind, Peragus teaches a much simpler rule: do not assume the familiar thing is safe just because you recognize it.
For a tutorial, that is wonderfully unfriendly. For 31 Days of Horror, it is almost suspiciously perfect.
About the author
Søren Ahrensborg Kamper has covered the history, design and preservation of Star Wars games since 2009. He edits Star Wars: Gaming, an independent fan-run site devoted to the video games of a galaxy far, far away.