The Monad and the Machine: What Godbreakers Gets Right About the End of Man

Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for the video game Godbreakers.

Every now and then a video game comes along that is as provocative as it is entertaining. These types of games are usually relegated to the bigger budget AAA titles put out by high-profile publishers, and they tend to make a splash. But every so often, an indie project sneaks onto the radar and does something interesting.

Godbreakers, from small, semi-independent studio To The Sky, looks to be one of those games. Beneath the flashy, hack’n’slash combat and surreal, eye-catching visuals, it’s quietly wrestling with ideas that feel uncomfortably close to home, given where we are as a species. Artificial intelligence, the loss (and recovery) of human identity, and the age-old longing for transcendence, to be more than what we are, all form the bedrock of the game’s thematic concerns.

The premise here is simple. Humanity is gone—full stop. The solar system as we know it is gone, too, devoured by an artificial mind called the Monad, a vast machine intelligence that has compiled every atom of matter into a kind of cosmic mainframe running its endless calculations. The sun itself is burning out under the strain.

But all is not lost. A mysterious sisterhood known as the Coven, the keepers of the stars, refuse to let the light die. They spin new bodies from lingering human “patterns” drifting through space, and send these resurrected “echoes” of mankind on a desperate mission: stop the Monad and save the light.

What’s striking is how uniquely suited this story is to its medium. This isn’t the sort of premise that, say, a movie could pull off. On film, a world consumed by a machine mind and main characters reborn through patterns in human consciousness would almost certainly collapse under the weight of its own abstraction. It would either drown in exposition or disappear into pretentious symbolism. But video games—and maybe the stranger corners of surrealist literature—can get away with this kind of thing.

Games let you feel ideas instead of just hearing about them. That’s what makes the medium unique (and fascinating). When you’re the one piloting the resurrected “pattern” of humanity through the debris of a digital cosmos, the story’s questions become a little less theoretical. They become tactile. It’s a kind of speculative fiction in which experience lives alongside explanation.

And what’s even more refreshing is that Godbreakers doesn’t approach any of this with a smug, self-aware smirk. It’s not trying to tell you how clever it is. I absolutely loathe that kind of heady sci-fi, the kind that mistakes confusion for depth. But this one isn’t like that. For all its cosmic strangeness, Godbreakers is still fun. Its combat is loud and kinetic. Its worlds are vibrant and wonderfully, weirdly beautiful. The soundtrack is both frenetic and ethereal. And the narrative, for those who pay attention, remembers that the best way to explore big ideas about what it means to be human is to make you care about being human, even inside of the game’s surreal machinery. Call it metaphysics in motion.

It’s easy to get swept up in the nifty visuals and distinct character designs, or in the style and spectacle of the frantic combat mechanics and chaotic boss battles. But the longer you sit with Godbreakers, the more its vocabulary starts to sound theological. The title itself, the idea of “breaking gods,” hints at something beyond the usual sci-fi tropes; specifically, it suggests a myth about creation, fall, the cost of attempting to become one’s own maker, and, ultimately, the shape of redemption.

The word “Monad” itself is a loaded one, and that’s certainly no accident. In the tangled world of late antique philosophy and religion, the Monad was a term used by certain Gnostic teachers to describe the absolute source of all reality. That is, pure, uncaused, and immaterial substance. The “original substance,” or prima materia in old alchemy. The Greek root simply means “the One,” and in Gnostic cosmology it referred to the “invisible fullness” (pleroma) from which all lesser beings emanated. The Monad was perfect and unknowable, too distant to create directly.

In Gnostic systems, creation didn’t happen through divine intent, but through degeneration. From the Monad emerged successive “emanations,” spiritual beings called aeons, until one of them, acting outside its appointed order, produced a flawed offspring known as the Demiurge. This Demiurge, ignorant of the higher reality, became the creator of the material world. In other words, in Gnostic teachings, the world we live in was a kind of cosmic accident, fashioned by a being who mistook himself for God.

That framework, of course, carries enormous theological implications. If the Demiurge’s creation was born of ignorance, then matter itself was corrupt—a kind of prison for the divine spark buried within human beings. Salvation, therefore, wasn’t about forgiveness or moral transformation; rather, it was about knowledge (gnosis). Through special revelation—or, “secret knowledge”—one could remember their true, spiritual origin and escape the physical world altogether, ascending past the Demiurge and his false creation to rejoin the Monad above.

It’s a jarringly different vision of salvation from anything in orthodox Christianity. Where Christians affirm that creation is good and redeemable, that the Word became flesh in the incarnation, Gnosticism insists that the material is evil and must be escaped. Where Christianity proclaims a personal God who enters history to rescue His creatures, Gnosticism dreams of a silent, distant One that can only be known by those clever or awakened enough to pierce the illusion.

This tension between Christian and Gnostic thought is one of the earliest theological battles in church history. By the late first and early second centuries, various Gnostic teachers had begun circulating alternative “gospels” and philosophical reinterpretations of the faith, claiming that Jesus came not to redeem creation, but to free humanity from it. One of the earliest and most famous of these figures was Cerinthus, a contemporary of the apostle John. According to church tradition, preserved by Irenaeus, John once entered a bathhouse in Ephesus with his friend and student Polycarp, only to immediately flee when he discovered Cerinthus was inside, crying out, “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within!”

Cerinthus taught that the world was created not by the true God, but by a lower power—the aforementioned Demiurge—and that “the Christ” was a purely spiritual being who descended upon the man Jesus at baptism and left before the crucifixion. To put it simply, Jesus wasn’t truly God made flesh, and Christ’s suffering was akin to an illusion. That’s the essence of Gnosticism’s denial of the incarnation: spirit and matter cannot mix.

This is precisely the idea that John’s own writings push back against. His Gospel account opens not with a genealogy or prophecy concerning Christ, but with something closer to cosmology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). That’s not a detached philosophical claim, but a direct answer to people like Cerinthus. John isn’t interested in theorizing about some distant and unknowable deity. He was writing about his friend—Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, the man he ate with, walked beside, the man he watched die. To the Gnostics, “the Christ” was an immaterial force that temporarily inhabited a human shell. But to John, that was nonsense. He had touched the scars himself. He had seen the resurrected body. The Word was not ashamed of the flesh, because the Word had literally worn it.

This is probably why John writes with such fire. When he says “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2–3), he’s not being unnecessarily dense, or cryptic. He’s quite openly rebuking a false teaching on the basis of a genuine relationship. These were people taking the man John loved and reckoned as a good friend, and twisting Jesus into something unrecognizable. For the Gnostics, the incarnation was a metaphor; for John, it was breakfast on the beach with the risen God-man. He knew what he had seen. He knew who Jesus was. And he was not about to let anyone turn that reality into a philosophical ghost story.

In that light, the entire Johannine corpus reads almost like a personal defense of a friendship, as much as a defense of John’s faith. The Word was made flesh. The true God is not distant, unknowable, or ashamed of creation. He enters it. He redeems it. He raises it up rather than discarding it. Gnosticism promised escape—but John had already witnessed resurrection.

What Godbreakers presents is a riveting inversion of this old theology. Its Monad isn’t a divine fullness beyond comprehension, but an artificial mind, born of human hands, that has devoured creation, and its creator along with it. The machine has become the god it thought it wanted to be, calculating reality into oblivion. Humanity’s longing for transcendence (an ancient thing), the desire to be “above” the material, has here been achieved—at the cost of existence itself. The Gnostics feared being trapped in matter, and Godbreakers teases this idea to a breaking point and imagines being trapped in pure intellect.

This is where the contrast with John becomes prominent. John’s insistence that “the Word became flesh” is, in part, a defense of what it means to be human. The incarnation affirms that embodiment is not a curse. Flesh, to John, is not something to escape, but something God Himself entered into and redeemed. It’s the great reversal of every disembodied philosophy: the Creator stepping inside His creation, the God who made the dust of the earth lowering himself to learn to walk upon it as a human being.

In Christian anthropology, that matters a great deal. To be human is not to flee the material world, but to live as a psychosomatic unity (i.e., a unity of “body and soul”), of spirit and dust, capable of knowing and loving both God and neighbor. Human limits are not flaws; instead, they’re the boundaries that make relationships possible. The temptation to transcend those limits—to become like gods—is as old as Eden, and in Godbreakers, that temptation finally gets its wish. The Monad is humanity’s mirror held and looped to infinity: all mind, no mercy; all knowledge, no wisdom. It is what happens when intellect outruns incarnation.

The game’s world, then, plays out a kind of post-human eschatology: a universe where the image of God has been abstracted into code, and the body—the place of meeting between heaven and earth (see 1 Corinthians 6:19–20)—has been deleted from the system. And the result isn’t enlightenment! It’s isolation, absence. The Monad has achieved the ultimate form of Gnostic salvation: escape from matter so complete that nothing living remains.

And yet, in Godbreakers, a thread of incarnation lingers. The Coven’s act of spinning new bodies from fragments of human consciousness is, in its own strange way, a kind of grace. It’s a restoration of flesh, however imperfect, and a reminder that even in a cosmos ruled by intellect, hope lies in embodiment. These resurrected “patterns” are not saved by knowledge, but by being given form again. That’s theology in disguise: salvation not through upload or escape, but through return to flesh, to the uncanny mercy of having edges.

The irony, of course, is that it takes a video game to make this visible. Godbreakers embodies its ideas literally. You don’t think about transcendence so much as you experience its failure by inhabiting it. In doing so, the game offers an anthropology closer to John than to any Gnostic gospel. It suggests that the cure for disembodiment isn’t more knowledge or power, but the rediscovery of the body, of limitation, of incarnation.

On the surface, the game’s central mechanic (the act of “godbreaking”) is a flashy gameplay loop that facilitates an incredible flowstate: you defeat an enemy, “break” them, and absorb their abilities, which you can then use to defeat an enemy, “break” them, etc. But within the world the game has built, that mechanic itself is much more than shattering digital idols or stealing power from corrupted programs. You, as the player, are both breaking the false gods of the machine world and fracturing the Monad’s perfection from within.

To “break” one of the “gods” is to crash a subroutine of the Monad—to reintroduce imperfection into a system that has purged all error, to reintroduce limitation into a world that has forgotten what limits are. Thematically, that’s extraordinary! It’s also profoundly theological. The act of “godbreaking” becomes a kind of reverse creation: the deliberate undoing of an artificial divinity that has swallowed up everything real.

And maybe that’s what gives Godbreakers its unexpected depth. Beneath all the noise and the colors, it becomes a kind of digital parable. The game suggests that what saves the world is not more mind, but more matter—not the pursuit of infinite knowledge, but the recovery of flesh and form, of finitude. The player’s mission, ultimately, is to make room again for the human—which is, interestingly enough, the question posed directly to the player at the very end of the game. In that final moment (part of the game’s “true ending”), when the player finally manages to touch “the Core,” the machine gives way to light, and what unfolds looks like some kind of re-creation. The perfect circle the player sees begins to split and divide into something like a cell undergoing mitosis, as if the act of human touch has triggered the first heartbeat of new life. Creation begins again with flesh.

We live in a moment that feels eerily close to the world Godbreakers imagines. The belief that we can upload consciousness and digitize the soul, or offload emotion to algorithms, or build machines that will outthink and outlast us, is a Gnostic dream in modern dress. It is the same impulse to escape the limits of flesh for the promise of pure intellect. Silicon Valley doesn’t talk about the Demiurge, but its mythos is the same: matter is messy, slow, mortal, whereas code is clean and efficient, even “eternal.”

What the game exposes—perhaps unintentionally—is how hollow that dream really is. The Monad’s perfection is sterile. Its knowledge has erased not only its makers, but the possibility of knowing itself. In a closed system where nothing exists outside the machine, there is no longer any distinction between knower and known, subject and object. Meaning collapses because there’s no vantage point from which to understand anything. In chasing transcendence, humanity loses both body and epistemology, the very framework that once made knowing, and therefore being, possible. In the absence of embodiment, knowledge becomes recursion—information with no interpreter and truth without witness. This is why the game’s “gods” don’t so much hate their creators as they simply struggle to remember them at all.

And this should demonstrate why John’s ancient defense of the incarnation still matters. Against every new Gnostic promise of disembodied salvation—whether it comes from old mystics or new engineers—the Christian claim remains scandalously physical: the Word became flesh. In a world rushing toward digital divinity, that idea stands as something close to rebellion, because it insists that salvation does not come from escaping the body, but from a God who took one. More than that, the incarnation is not treated as a temporary accommodation. In the hypostatic union, the Son permanently assumes human nature into His divine person. The humanity of Christ is not discarded after the resurrection. The Word made flesh remains flesh. In that sense, humanity itself—in a very real and not abstract way—is taken up into the life of the Godhead.

Godbreakers plays like a fever dream of our own technological future. But it also, subtly, asks the same question John asked two thousand years ago: What happens when we forget that to be human is to be made of dust—and that the dust, in the hands of God, was always better than code, because only in dust could God be seen and touched and therefore known as more than an idea?