ENTRY 22: THE SINGULARITY (HUX-A7-13)

  Hux has a pretty typical backstory for killer AI, but that's fine! Something's gotta fill that niche! And its design is superb. A crooked, mangled, half-melted looking figure of purple flesh and electronics, its head looks only vaguely human with a roundish tooth-lined hole of a mouth, an oversized visor a bit like a VR helmet, a hunched over torso and long, irregular limbs, with an overall shape that seems to have taken direct inspiration from Brundlefly, who has easily one of my top ten or twenty overall shapes:

  I do always love when a cybernetic being is grisly and malformed, the combination of machinery and flesh creating something completely disordered that's still somehow more dangerous than the sum of its parts. Hux has a lovably glitchy, stuttering retro computer voice and shuddering, lurching walk cycle that doesn't look like it should be able to keep up with panicked humans, but it's just fast enough regardless.

Hux's special ability is fittingly enough one of the most complicated and advanced in the game, Quantum Instantiation. This allows you to fire "biopods" from Hux's arm, tumorous blobs of biotech that will latch on to structures until you decide to destroy one, or you place enough of them that the oldest are cycled back out. Hux can see all biopods on the map at all times, switch to their perspectives like a network of security cameras, and use them to tag survivors with a "temporal slipstream" status. This infects the survivor with biotech goo that can also spread to other survivors, and it allows Hux to teleport directly to them by either tagging them a second time or shooting them directly with the biopod gun.

BEST SKIN(S):

"HUXLEE HYBRID:" all of Hux's model swaps are good, and I can't easily put them in an order of my favorites, each completely changing the components our adorable robot buddy is cobbled together from. Huxlee Hybrid most notably incorporates a futuristic space helmet for the head, the visor smashed open and overgrown with one cybernetic eye!

"CUTTER FRAME:" a more dangerous, more industrial looking machine with a more minimalistic infusion of organic matter, the head is more like a featureless fleshy bag besides its single metal eyepiece, and over the mouth area is a row of four circular saws! This also comes in an all blue and white icy version called "Cold Snap," which I think looks technically cooler than the fiery orange and red, but the latter makes the individual details pop a bit better.

"OLD MODEL:" this one has robot head with a slightly retro feel, something you might see on an old comic book cover or as the head design for a background Star Wars droid, "cool" but also kind of cutesy? Except of course the fact that the "mouth" of the droid head is full of mutated flesh with a single large camera-lens eye in the center. I really wish I could have gathered high-resolution images of every single skin I've featured here, but there's no single, easy source of them; larger, clearer models have been uploaded by different users around the internet, here and there, but collecting them all with proper credit would have been kind of an undertaking.

"ARCADE MACHINE:" really different looking from the rest! The limbs have an even higher ratio of gummy flesh to machinery when compared to the other models, there are indeed chunks of an arcade machine integrated into the torso, back and especially one shoulder, and the head is a total reworking with a jawless, human skull on top, its mouth stretching into a huge orifice more like an open "hood" with tubing, wiring and a single tiny light inside. Fantastically cool and threatening! But was this inspired at all by that Lemon Demon song? The one also about a man horrifyingly merging with an arcade cabinet? Cabinet Man???

"DEATHKTOP:" a rare exclusive skin that was, at the time of this writing, only released once so far before it was (for now?) retired, but it's probably the most striking of the bunch. The cybernetics look more weathered and grimy, the flesh is darker and more withered looking, and the head is entirely an old CTR computer monitor. It also has old television antennas on it, but the name is a cute pun on desktop, so it's probably supposed to lean more computer than TV. In-game, it should be noted there's a lot more glowing lights on Hux's models, and this one even has an illuminated fan spinning in its chest! And yes, the fuzzy screen occasionally displays other things, including a single split-second pixelated skull during one animation, captured for us by Syralex:

MY SUGGESTIONS:

An Insect Skin: obviously! Hux is not only shaped like Brundlefly, but even revolves around teleportation technology, so pushing it into a more direct homage to The Fly would be a natural fit. I'd rather it be an original than a licensed skin, and they could avoid potential copyright complaints if they mixed it up with multiple insects at once.

An Original Animatronic Mascot: they have Springtrap from Five Nights at Freddy's in this game, but what if someone likes the concept of a killer animatronic and just isn't into FNAF? Hux would be a fun excuse to come up with a brand new cybernetic puppet friend, which I think would be a lot of fun with Hux's animations and mannerisms. A googly-eyed, felt-skinned cartoon dog convulsing around the map and leaving a trail of biomechanical eyeball tumors would be pure fun.

Animal Biomass: Hux mostly builds its flesh parts by assimilating humans, but it would be cool to see some imperfect result of integrating with other species, various animal characteristics fused together like a bad taxidermy project.

NAVIGATION: