Mass Effect: Andromeda's First Big Sidequest

One of Mass Effect: Andromeda’s earliest sidequests is called  "First Murderer," and it is a total let-down.

Here’s how things went down: during a colonizing effort on a nearby planet, a Turian named Nilken Rensus allegedly murders his friend after he refuses to let some settlers retreat from an onslaught. Eye-witness accounts accounts back that story up, but Nilken the imprisoned Turian says they have it wrong. He would never fire on his close friend, even if mutiny was the only way to preserve the remaining lives of the colony. You set off to fact-check these details, and see if you can uncover anything new that might seal the case.

To discover if Nilken is really innocent or not, I descended onto Eos and...scanned for clues. Abandoned and desolate, there’s no one to talk to on the planet about what happened, so the only thing you can do is look at broken equipment and half-buried corpses. If only these bones could talk!

They can, in a manner of speaking, thanks to the wonders of your trusty AI named SAM. Just pull out your scanner and press X over any object to have it tell you exactly what happened it. Following the trail of the dead victims scattered remains, SAM reconstructs The Truth with ease. It reminded me of when Batman gleaned a serial number from a fractured shell casing by firing a bunch of bullets into slabs of rock in that one movie, with way less action. 

In Mass Effect, you literally just walk from one place to another, hold down a button to either read some new text, or hear a snippet of dialogue. It’s boring.

It turns out Nilken didn’t commit the murder, at least according to SAM’s analysis of the body, which reveals it was the Kett’s gunfire that killed him. But Nilken did try to kill him. This wrinkle gets added thanks to a handy recording of the victim’s last moments which reveals Nilken fired and missed. Elementary, my dear SAM.

Back onboard the Nexus I was prepared for my new findings to make a splash. Perhaps these complicating factors would help turn the murder case into a springboard for discussing the rules, duties, and justice more generally in the Andromeda Initiative. Surely, even if Nilken had killed in cold blood, the fact that his friend was leading the rest of the colony toward a futile end by facing-off with the Kett was a mitigating factor. These people came to Andromeda to start new and wondrous lives, not throw them away in shootouts with the locals.

Instead, I was only given the option to free Nilken in light of the new evidence or suppress it and let his sentence of exile be carried out. The space station’s paper-pusher-in-chief, Jarun Tann, suggests you try not to stir things back up but also insinuates you’ll be the one to blame if people realize you tried to shove the increasingly tedious matter under the rug. Committed to high ideals like truth, justice, and the desperate pursuit of whatever conversation options were still left, I confronted Nilken. “Oh fuck, so I’m free?!” he said, or something to that effect. I tried to shame him by playing the audio recording of his dirty deed back to him, but he didn’t seem much phased by it. He basically responded with, “But bro, my shot missed.”

Over the course of the trial you see how facts are twisted or abandoned, and how reason can lead you toward the truth as well as away from, all while Jeremy Soule’s serene, melancholy soundtrack plays in the background. There aren’t any winners by the end of it. The woman is still dead, even though she was a Sith spy, and the authority of the outcome means that the deeper, more complex truth, known only to the player, is lies buried to everyone else.

Unlike the war hero and his wife, who escape Manaan after the trial and take off for another planet, in Andromeda I’m stuck with Nilken (for a while at least). I’ll see him wandering around the Nexus, brooding about the unsatisfying turn his life took all because of an under-cooked side quest.

-Anonymous Gamer