Chimera Squad Analysis: Sacred Coil Intro

Sacred Coil isn't as well-executed a concept as Gray Phoenix, nor as intuitively obvious of one, but I think they're probably the most conceptually complex of the Investigation targets, and so in some sense the most interesting one.

At a glance, Sacred Coil does have a straightforward concept to focus on: they're ADVENT loyalists who are trying to fight against the new order and push society into something like what ADVENT rule produced. Their units are primarily hybrids (Though in gameplay you could be forgiven for thinking they're supposed to be straight humans, as they default to body-concealing outfits), they make use of ADVENT Mecs, they bring back multiple ADVENT-specific concepts (A flamethrower infantry unit, a soldier that can slap down energy shields on surrounding allies by slamming the ground, Mark Target as an ability...), and their propaganda directly carries forward a lot of the threads of ADVENT propaganda. ('The Old World' being used to refer to the pre-invasion Earth days and perpetually presenting said Old World as morally bankrupt and inferior to the ADVENT-controlled version of Earth, just now presenting the new Earth administration as trying to return to this Old World style instead of decrying the old Earth governments)

But there's other layers. For example, I suggested in the War of the Chosen class intro that ADVENT could be kept around as something of a Cult of Sirius analogue, and Sacred Coil actually does very much hit that note, even more so than I'd really meant in that post; I hadn't actually been thinking of how the Cult of Sirius is specifically a religious organization when I wrote that post, and that is very much a piece of how Sacred Coil parallels the Cult of Sirius. Related to this is that Sacred Coil gives somewhat more context to something I commented on in War of the Chosen, where there's a religious undertone to its added content but this religious element is handled so ambiguously in War of the Chosen it's not clear whether it's really a religious thing at all.

Sacred Coil confirms that, yes, this religious undertone is genuinely a real thing, and though it still leaves a lot of elements vague (In part because it's unclear whether various religious elements we see in Chimera Squad were present before the Ethereals were defeated, or if these elements got created by Sacred Coil afterward), it does broadly paint a picture that at minimum the ADVENT hybrids were inculcated with an attitude of worship toward the Ethereals and had religious locations and rituals. (Whether these religious elements were aimed at other Ethereal minions is not addressed at all, alas)

Notably, while Sacred Coil is dealt with by the end of Chimera Squad, it's easy to imagine that other sects, cells, or ideologically distinct-but-related groups remain throughout the world, and so what I suggested of ADVENT loyalists acting as a Cult of Sirius analogue could absolutely still happen in XCOM 3, no need for retcons or anything of the sort.

But I said Sacred Coil is 'conceptually complex', and a big part of what I mean is that they end up being used to touch on and explore a lot more elements of the world's condition and whatnot than the other factions. With the Progeny, we never really get context on why people are joining the group, or what kind of agendas they have on a day-to-day level, and in practice they mostly get used as a jumping-off point for contextualizing how psychic powers fit into the current world order... and even this piece doesn't get touched on that much, honestly. Similarly, Gray Phoenix gives us some bits on Muton culture and gives some new insight into what the Ethereal process of landing on Earth and setting up shop involved, as well as showing us that not every alien is happy to integrate into the new world order, but is only a little less narrow in focus than the Progeny. Sacred Coil ends up giving us a lot more insight into how ADVENT worked, how ADVENT hybrids were kept loyal and how they viewed the world when they bought into the framework the Ethereals fed them, shows new dimensions to how shoddy of overlords the Ethereals were (You can get a quote after a mission in an ADVENT bunker about how nobody knows why the Ethereals insisted on such things being made: the Ethereals apparently routinely gave orders without contextualizing what goal these orders served, which among other points implicitly discourages their minions from showing initiative), more clearly affirms Chryssalids were used as essentially disposable attack dogs, and several other bits I'm outright forgetting. Sacred Coil ends up covering a lot of ground!

There's still plenty of oddities and gaps, mind, as Chimera Squad rarely addresses individual enemy types in a direct, explicit manner and pretty clearly has some of its decisions primarily serve 'pure game design' goals that aren't necessarily an easy fit to the narrative. (This is probably why Gray Phoenix got the Sectopod, for example; the devs wanted it to be fought somewhere, and ultimately this was a higher priority than the question of whether fighting a Sectopod anywhere in this story makes any narrative sense) But there's quite a bit here; from the perspective of filling out the world and communicating interesting stuff about the narrative to the player, I'd argue Sacred Coil is the best-made faction.

Not... so much for their gameplay experience... I'll be talking about this in the individual enemy posts, primarily, but Sacred Coil has a lot of gameplay design that fits jankily with Chimera Squad's overall design, and is pretty inarguably the most difficult Investigation faction to fight, no matter how you order your Investigations, which is janky given the game clearly intends any Investigation order to be equally valid to any other order.

I do quite like Sacred Coil's combat music, at least! It's some of Chimera Squad's better music in general, and it's also some of the easiest to connect to the faction's thematics, with the military vibe and especially the mechanical or electronic aspects. Sacred Coil is the faction with the most robots, full stop, after all. Take Down Sacred Coil also works very nicely as an extension of that general vibe that nonetheless is very distinct and fits better to a higher-stakes situation.

And of course, there's their icon to discuss;

I'm honestly not sure what Sacred Coil's icon is supposed to be about. It's an abstract set of shapes, much like Gray Phoenix's icon, and as far as I'm aware nothing in-game attempts to explain it. I could easily buy any of...

-It's meant to be derived from the Ethereal icon that was used in XCOM 2 for, among other things, the Chosen enemy icons

-It's meant to be a very stylized ADVENT helmet

-It's counterintuitively meant to be a stylized Sectoid head

-It's more intuitively meant to be a highly stylized depiction of how hybrids tend to have their foreheads be more prominent

-It's meant to be a stylized depiction of the Network Tower, with the outer line being a stylized halo of light or some such 

-It's meant to be a stylized depiction of a Psi Amp

-It's just meant to look cool and the artist had nothing in mind for it to be a representation of

It works fine as an icon, and indeed one of the low-key smart things the game does is that the basic icon shapes for each faction are generally obviously different even at a glance. The Gray Phoenix icon is broadly a triangle, the Sacred Coil icon is broadly a circle, and the Progeny icon is vaguely rectangular if you're not really looking at it; they're told apart pretty readily. The only real slipup here is that Shrike has their own icon, and if you don't look closely it's easy to mix it up with the Sacred Coil icon because they're both rounded toward the top and less fully rounded toward the bottom, and the sprites are small enough in-game that the detail differences are easy to not parse readily.

Honestly, I like the Sacred Coil icon, but I wish I knew what it was about...

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Next time, we move on to the most common Sacred Coil unit, the Android.

See you then.