I did not expect to come across such a profound experience at the bottom of my game recommendations. At first I didn't want to leave a review and simply move on with the story as a new part of me, but once I started reading the review section, I thought I would offer my perspective on this experience.
Spoilers for the game:
This game to me wasn't about sickness, a psychedelic experience, or an imitation of a physical art gallery but about everything all at once. It was about life, a meditation on life to be precise. I didn't know what to expect when I booted up the game, but from the first seconds of new life growing, I was becoming my emotions. For the sake of clarity, I do not mean that you can experience this game a single way, or that my way is the right way. My way is simply my way, and I feel I would like to share it with anyone willing to read my thoughts.
Once I started walking and was met with all the voices in simultaneous harmony and disharmony, I was reminded of the way in which we traverse our lives attentive and not so attentive to the voices around us: the voices of our peers, families, pets, plants, rivers and oceans, the sky and everything encompassed within the world. The game carries a lot of Buddhist and Daoist philosophies within itself from the way in which life is interconnected and, as the game suggests, we are all found within sunlight. Without sunlight, there would be no plants, without plants, no oxygen or food for animals, without food, no Us. At the same time, we feel the rays of sun the same way across millennia of living entities, warm on the skin, soothing and nourishing.
This game is just the right game, it doesn't need to be more or less. It merely asks for your time and emotions. Sometimes, you are able to give these, other times you aren't. That in itself is also a reflection on where you are in life, who you are and who you are becoming.
Furthermore, the other prominent aspect of the game besides the cacophonous voices is the switching between light and dark, between sunlight and moonlight. When the monologues end, a bright light illuminates certain spots with the flowers you need to pick up. At first it was puzzling, but eventually it reminded me of how we tend to walk from point A to point B to point C to further some kind of goal we have, and the game does not offer a hierarchy of steps; you are allowed to simply walk to whichever flower you want to. The choice of direction is up to you, just like in your own life where making each decision can sometimes be difficult when seeing all the possibilities you could take, but eventually you need to settle on a route. The fact that we are making such decisions under the dark sky illuminated by merely the moon suggests the difficulty of these choices we make every day, but once we make them and work through our struggles, light emerges anew.
I would like to share a quote from one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin. It is from her book called [i] The Word for World is Forest [/i] and it goes:
“The world is always new,” said Coro Mena, “however old its roots. [...] I shall never walk again that path I came with you yesterday, the way up from the willow grove that I’ve walked on all my life. It is changed. You have walked on it and it is utterly changed. Before this day the thing we had to do was the right thing to do; the way we had to go was the right way and led us home. Where is our home now? For you’ve done what you had to do, and it was not right.” (pages 32-3)
The way this game deals with this change is through voices, directions, light and darkness, and through your own footsteps among the seemingly stagnant scenery. At the end, once you have collected enough flowers, you realize you have been walking to the edge of the forest all along without realizing. The sameness of our environment was familiar, safe, quite boring, and to me that was the whole point. We don't often take notice of our everyday surroundings and look to travel to faraway places to enrich ourselves when in fact, every leaf, every tree, every person, every strand of hair on our bodies are ever anew. What Coro Mena says is similar to how you cannot trace your steps back anymore once you reach the edge of the forest. You cannot visit the same tree you start out with, but as the narrator says in the game, the story isn't necessarily ending, but moving on, continuing. And we must move on with it.
Once you reach the burnt down, or perhaps deforested patch, you are met with other players' messages that brings about a sense of awe, gratitude, inspiration and a whole orchestra of emotions, a true finale of the game. I was touched by the simple gesture eventhough it is by no means a new game mechanic. But it doesn't have to be. What matters is that I experienced a story, people's thoughts and feelings that reached me in the here and now, which is what makes it new.
