Clearly I’ve missed something when it comes to this quest. I must have missed some major story elements or something. Because what I thought happened isn’t actually what happened at all. Just a quick note, this article is VERY spoiler-heavy. I’m warning you now.

SPOILERS AHEAD, PLEASE GO DO THE QUEST FIRST BEFORE YOU CONTINUE.

Or not. Some people don’t mind being spoiled.

Now, it turns out I missed something while playing Duviri paradox. It turns out, I was wrong about who Thrax is. Thrax isn’t just some random person. Thrax is the Drifter. Or the Drifter is Thrax. Or the Operator is Thrax. Either way, the bad guy turns out to be a version of us. A scared, little child somehow making a whole pocket dimension with the soul purpose of being an endless loop or something.

Yeah, I’m confused.

I think what you’re supposed to work out is that Thrax is a manifestation of the Drifter. A child version, perhaps younger than our Operator. The kid’s emotions are all out of whack, and we basically loop back and forth forever, based on Thrax’s emotions. The Drifter is trapped inside an emotional loop and has become dead inside, while Thrax barely keeps control over his emotions. The ending idea is that you can and have to control your emotions, in order to escape from things like depression.

But why does any of this happen? Why the hell is the Drifter, before Lotus’s hand interrupts everything, constantly in a loop of being murdered? How does that even work? Does the Drifter subconsciously just want to give up and die, is that why he’s looping around being stabbed every day? And by following Teshin’s guidance, Drifter allows himself a chance to feel and accept different emotions, also allowing himself a chance to escape Duviri?

Is all of this self-imposed self-hatred? Because that’s how I’m looking at it now.

Gameplay-wise though, it does actually kinda made sense. You start your adventure in Teshin’s cave and play until you want to extract, and you do so by going to Thrax’s tower and restarting the loop again, so every run goes differently every time. You basically reset every time you finish a mission.

It’s also worth noting that Thrax is a young boy. However, my Drifter is female. But I guess manifestations of your own internal fears and emotions don’t particularly care what gender you are.

Honestly I’m not sure I like this. I don’t like the idea that the Drifter is their own worst enemy, even more so than Thrax. After all the work we put into escaping and finding the missing doll pieces, it’s not fun to see Drifter actually repeat the cycle again, of his own volition. Sure, we do it to save Teshin, but it all feels like a dream sequence or something. Eternally looping back and forth on a collection of unstable islands, built from the mind of a manifestation of the Drifter himself.

And on top of it all, nothing inside Duviri is ever explained either. Are all these people who live in Duviri real? Or are they part of Thrax’s imagination? How did Drifter’s fears and emotions turn into a person, who then built a whole massive landscape? Who knows? Well, the Void knows, and probably the Man in the Wall is part of this as well. But you get what I mean.

The more I sit and think about this, the weirder things get. And I’m not sure I like it. It’s just too messy for me to comprehend.