Played four or five times. This was sublime, and although I never achieved the stated goal of the game I’ll be thinking about this for a while. Although it’s pretty obtuse in its messaging and hard to know what to do without reading the comments, there’s a lot about it that was really evocative after spending a bit of time with the game.
- The feeling of not knowing whether I was exploring a dead online game—was I just following my own trails?
- The sudden death of the protagonist, with no prompt to play again, giving you time to sit with the journey you just took them on.
- The merchants selling things I could probably never hope to afford within one lifetime.
- The cues on where to hide/find the artefact based on the different cultures’ superstitions, creating a sort of meta-roleplaying-game that you can choose to participate in and you can only hope the previous bearer was playing too.
- The time I played as a farmer—the only time that when I died my body and possessions dissolved and returned to the earth. That really struck me.
Thank you for this!