Daemons design is perfect because of its lack of design, just an omnipresent gaze that witnesses all and will bore into your soul. The initial scene where Ze shows that Daemon is in fact over top the menu is one of the most effective pay offs I’ve ever seen in a digital video game based arg and it came from a series that started off a satire prompt.
Ze is also a great protag from a meta angle of running a video game based arg, while the original premise of A ReGect is an arg with a monster that’s bad at its job Ze also answers the age old question of “why not just turn off the game”
Ze never takes much of this seriously, and if he does it’s not for long. Even when tensions are high Ze tries to break tension with humor or bickering. Ze is a very real player character in this story and has a motive, the fact he’s grown emotionally attached to Regect and Moe as real friends even if they only exist as sentient life haunting code. It’s that factor that keeps pushing Ze to keep going. And Ze’s attachment to his reality outside of this keeps him from asking the more existential questions that gives us the longer plot to play in figuring out what’s really going on under the surface. (Literally)
