thought Casualties: Unknown was dark (and it is) with how cold, hard, and oppressively objective its deaths are. the alarms in your ears, slowly losing consciousness, watching your vitals tick down on the health panel the captors gave you. how the only way you're considered dead is your brain dying. how the older versions only described it as "Permanent, irreversible, and complete loss of brain function." like your brain was all you ever were. like there's no meaning to it. like your death didn't matter and neither did your life. because that is all you ever were to them. a tool. a statistic. an experiment. a casualty.
but then I thought about the Last Stand, and how it just defies all medical logic, and how its activated by having a high mood prior to your death. you choose to keep living. the way the words of encouragement aren't in the pixelated font the rest of the game is in, but a messy, imperfect scrawl. you choose to keep living, even though it should be impossible, even though they tell you it's impossible, in the health panel, in the "termination imminent" alarm, in the hopelessness of watching the clock run out while you're unconscious. you are not done with life. by defying logic, by defying death, you're defying the captors just as much. it's not permanent, it's not invulnerability, but it's such a huge slap in the face to everything they thought you were. they never cared that you were alive, they don't decide when you're dead.
