Alright... let me take a seat and reflect a bit. I even made myself a cup of fennel tea with cinnamon because your little adventure got me thinking, in more ways than one, a bit beyond the biomes and the ominouss atmosfere by Sergi Pavkin, which really set the experience well, dictating Max's past and destiny in the face of Milla's fatalism.
Even though I entered this game jam universe this year, I really appreciate how independent proposals bring fragmented reflections that commercial projects simply cannot. From a commercial standpoint, Max being so slow, without a laser rifler and lacking a catchphrase followed by a last shout of "die motherfucker die!" is a big problem because, as a game, it asks for something like that to be "fun." Aside from that, I enjoyed the playful approach here, especially since I no longer have the same time window for long gaming sessions without severe consequences; therefore, the ability to synthesize is something I really value. By the way, I found just one grammatical error: in the Yan/Central Hub stage, Max says "Maybe something is doing it's Workq" instead of "Work" at the end of the sentence in the terminal.
Kelly's analogy about the cosmic garden and Albert's optimistic view as something more than humanity stumbling through the test of time coincidentally echoes what I did within the experience of my project, like nature itself, which is a declaration about life. Fungi, algae, bacteria, energetic interactions—nature constantly establishing itself as the floor and ceiling of everything that has come and will come.
The issue is that the universe, the cosmos, represents the final purpose, where experiences repeat in an infinite wave, but with eternal variations because it is immutable. It was present before we were born and will perpetuate for long generations after we cease to exist, because change lies in continuous adaptation. The universe we understood in childhood, in its entirety, remains, but our rational and moral comprehension of how this universe communicates, what it wants, what we can do, and what we can extract changes. The perception of this totality falls into a strange conceptual limbo because the cosmos is a journey back to the beginning: seeking food, water, a means of subsistence, mastering the law of the jungle, shifting from predator to prey, and dominating instead of being dominated. Every trip to the cosmos is a return to the past, in our most intimate fragility, because it’s about going back to the point where we had no certainties, inhabiting that intersection where social guarantees cease to exist. There is no collaborative social contract, but an environment where this exists and serves as a starting point to do differently, to be different, to seek different solutions for the same old problems.
Max could be a firefighter, a doctor, a police officer, or a teacher, and the challenge imposed by his sister would be the same because it’s the contrast between absence with competence and presence where there’s nothing left to do but accept how things are: stagnant, unsatisfactory, ungrateful, yet the only path forward to, in the next situation/state, be better, do differently, be present where your name represented absence for those who cling to your legacy/significance/value. This was really cool; I had a great time with this experience. I’ll keep a close eye on your future projects, Alex and Iris. I’m very glad to have met you both.