Chimera Squad Analysis: The Progeny Intro

The Progeny are, gameplay-wise, pretty clearly meant to be the player's first Investigation that eases them into the game, and in service of that function are probably the blandest of the Investigation factions, which feels a bit strange given their core distinction is being The Psychic Faction. It's also kind of strange from a more purely gameplay standpoint, in that Gray Phoenix and Sacred Coil are heavier on directly recycling mechanics from XCOM 2, where the Progeny have more brand-new mechanics to trip up an XCOM 2 veteran learning Chimera Squad; I personally probably would've tried to set up Gray Phoenix as the Boring Default Investigation Target for that reason, among others.

The Progeny still are probably the easiest faction to start with when first playing the game simply because their units tend to be on the weak side and even their unique mechanics tend to be pretty unfavorable to them, but it's an odd-looking decision.

In spite of being defined as The Psychic Faction, it should be noted that the Progeny don't really use Psi Offense-on-Will tests. Much like Psi Operatives in XCOM 2, a lot of their conceptually psionic abilities actually skip 'dice' mechanics, reliably doing whatever they're supposed to without regard to stats. This isn't super-important in practice since Chimera Squad gives you essentially no ability to bolster agent Will anyway, but it's still worth mentioning.

I've mentioned factional icons on and off, and here's the Progeny's:

In gameplay it's not colored like this; you'll normally see it be solidly filled in as light green, orange, or a dark-ish red, depending on either their Alert state (During the Breach Phase) or whether you're considered to be flanking them or not. (Outside the Breach Phase)

The icon itself is pretty obviously a stylized human hand. I don't think there's meant to be anything else to its design, though I have wondered about the empty space behind the middle finger. Was it done just for 'cool factor' or visual clarity reasons, or is there some potential symbolic meaning I'm unfamiliar with? I suspect it's the 'cool factor' or visual clarity point, but I do have to wonder.

Narratively, the Progeny's basic framework is... probably the vaguest of the three Investigation targets. They have a leader, she's trying to do a specific thing -which I'll be talking about when we get to her in a later post- and there's some implications of speciesism to the Progeny where they seem to be using psionic brainwashing to get hybrids and Sectoids working for them, but it's not particularly clear what the average Progeny groundpounder thinks is going on, why they might want to sign onto this group, etc. It's easy enough to kind of assume they're a cult-ish group who helps their members unlock and master their psychic powers as the payoff for being in the group and doing what it wants, and I wouldn't be surprised if some interview somewhere has a dev explicitly laying out such a model, but the game itself never really tries to communicate what the Progeny as a group are about.

And honestly, some bits are such that I doubt a truly coherent model underlies it. One of the beats with the Progeny is that they get a hold of a Codex and use it to project other Codex bodies about, explaining why Codices are part of the Progeny enemy lineup, but then the game never really provides a reason or purpose to the Progeny choosing to do this; it comes across like it was done for the 'meta' reason that Codices are a psionic enemy, the Progeny are the psionic faction, and so the game throws Codices onto the Progeny lineup.

By a similar token, the whole thing where the Progeny is psychically brainwashing hybrids and Sectoids is... broadly logical as an abuse of psychic powers, but the game doesn't provide any detail. Why that selection? Are the Progeny speciesist toward hybrids and Sectoids in particular for some reason? Or maybe hybrids and Sectoids are easier for the Progeny to psychically influence than Mutons, Vipers, Faceless, etc? Similarly, what's the Progeny doctrine and associated rationales and mental models when it comes to such? That is, are they explicitly thinking of controlled hybrids as ablative armor for the human members, and if so do they have any rhetoric for trying to justify this as not a morally reprehensible act, or what?

It's all a bit odd for the faction the game pretty clearly pushes a player toward picking as their first Investigation target, in that the other factions are notably clearer in concept, rhetoric, etc. It's much more typical for a game to have the earliest enemies the player faces be the most clearly thought-out and later enemies be the ones who aren't clearly defined. (And/or to have their defined lore difficult to reconcile with the broader game, or with prior games in the series, or otherwise be contradictory)

It all makes me wonder what happened in Chimera Squad's development that we got this collage of oddities regarding the Progeny.

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Next time, we start more properly covering the Progeny as a faction with one of their more basic units; the Acolyte.

See you then.