curto... MAS interessante, traz pensamentos e criticas que estimulam uma forma não convencional de pensar, o deuteragonista é alguém que traz uma ótima contraparte cética e cientifica ao protagonista que se baseia inteiramente a fé, a gameplay é no mesmo estilo de sempre da Etherane e a arte como sempre também é incrível, assim fazendo o jogo se sustentar em sua personalidade critica e misteriosa, seu estilo belo e muito bem feito para cumprir seu proposito e por fim a historia que se desenvolve muito bem, se assemelhando a o estilo de storytelling de um conto. Assim todos eles juntos rendem um curto porém bom e ousado jogo

Either I'm not smart enough or I'm not familiar with etherane's works but I just didn't get it.

It talks about a very fascinating topic which are cults/religions and indoctrination with a made-up religion to then deliver nothing?
They really nailed the "brain fog" feeling that some cults have when criticized by people that don't lack judgement, but.. it's just that

it's like making a world war 2 game where there is a kid coloring a drawing and then a bomb falls and credits roll in. That level of "oh... okay?" is what I felt when I finished both endings that this game has to offer.

I really wish positive reviews talked about why the game is good rather than just people hungry for more of etherane's works.
If you are into confusing stories, you're in your own because there is no thread on the steam forum, no guide, no wiki aside of... "etherane's works fanmade wiki" where the article is a stub or "unfinished" for more than three years now because no one gets this game, with the story section in the wiki being nothing but a transcription of the events that happen, excluding the endings lol

Apparently, unless you're very hungry for more works of this dev, you won't enjoy this one, which is a shame because it's the one I picked to be my first.

i personally harbour no religious ties or guilt whatsoever myself, but tomorrow won't come's portrayal of childhood experiences and how they can shape our futures felt extremely tangible and sharp. religious organisations and hierarchies and how they assert control over the faithful, harmful and avoidant thinking strategies which only result in self-mutilating apathy, the cling to a fading sense of self.

etherane's textured illustrations and simplistic yet expressive characters are wonderfully charming. i enjoyed a few tracks on the score, but the very significant "noise" sound had an awful effect on my tinnitus ass. i also had little patience for a very small segment midway through, and did consult a guide for both this area and obtaining the other, difficult to obtain ending. spending the extra half hour to experience the full story was well worth it however.

there was some point in time where i could tell you how this quaint looking game entered my backlog, but that point in time is gone; it is now the past. but when i first saw it i still remember how it made me feel. the redacted white block of text, the purple figure at the edge of the hallway made even more obscure by the tiny factor of the game poster. the developer behind this game is etherane, who as far as i can tell from one of my friends and from generally peeking around is most well known for their Hello Charlotte series of games.

in any case, i bought this game for a (very modest) 2 dollars, and started it up - mind blank, ready for anything. my character - to my surprise, the approaching figure in the back on the poster - is Ori, a religious boy who wakes up in a bathtub.

the first thing you notice as you enter the game world, summarized by our main character sleeping in a bathtub - Ori's purple hair contrasting against the white of the tub and the tile-floor - is the subdued yet surrealistic aesthetic of this place. it's been a while since i've played any of these half-arthouse post-Yume Nikki RPG Maker games - and longer yet since i've experienced any of them anew - and seeing something like this in this year has a sort of wistful nostalgia to it. nothing is really expressed directly for a lot of the game, everything is behind a metaphor that is seemingly only there to be there. of course, i'm not complaining; games like Hylics use this sort of "text as atmosphere" approach very well with its use of procedurally generated text, and although scripted this game gives the vibe of a similar process albeit with far different effects.

this game is more or less a visual novel with game elements; you walk around and do puzzles while going through dialogue which builds this world and endears you to the characters. all the puzzles in this game are simple enough that you don't have to disengage with the story or atmosphere to solve them. the almost clinical atmosphere of these puzzles in contrast with the strangely tender and sympathetic main-game creates a really interesting tonal whiplash that enhances both sides of the coin a lot.

beginning to talk about plot now, if i have sold you please go in blind and enjoy!

as you go through this world the first time, you will likely come across some strange collectables as you go. the former of these are Card Packs, which contain cards of the various Celestials - the main enemies for the majority of the game who seem to posess humans and control them with an unknown negative force known simply as Dithyrambs. these treasures face externally, attempting to somehow logically describe this strange and chaotic world.

the latter of these treasures are Indulgences which, seemingly inverse to Card Packs, take us into Ori's mind and past - a detail which is strangely glossed upon for all the little hints we get for the past of our secondary character Remiel (henceforth Rem). these Indulgences tell us about Ori's past with his sister, Mari. originally best friends and avid roleplayers, a mysterious event befalls Mari and soon after she encourages Ori to join the "Choir", a vaguely religious organization which we see Ori a part of during the events of the game.

as you finish your first playthrough of the game, you don't get a lot of clarification as to what this event was or how exactly it manifested in mari, other than a vague sense of a shattering ego. you just assume she's possessed by yet another celestial or whatever. it looms over your head like a spectre. right after beating this i tried to play it again, it was obvious i had missed a few things (one of the advantages of this second hidden ending is how it's just kind of done by doing the things you didn't do on your first run) so i, without even looking it up, already knew i wanted to play again.

the first ending sees you wake up from a purification capsule - a structure you have seen or heard of multiple times in the game by this point - as Rem, surprisingly enough. it's a bit surprising at first, but considering Rem's behaviour through the game, and the game being a process of him finding a friend in the Choir, finding faith even where Ori cannot, and lastly acquiring his own Rosary, it's not like it's contrived - it's a good half-twist that i'm all for. after being congratulated by a conductor (not necessarily the conductor), on his way to post-purification recovery, he comes across Ori. the conductor mentions that he does not keep the memories of himself in the simulation, but seeing Ori not know Rem is still really sad. Rem remarks on two things; the first being how he feels like something is missing now that the Celestial is purged from him, and how Ori seems to look like the conductor but younger. this ending on some level wraps up the game adequately, but for all the surrealist melodramatic dystopia the story built up it certainly feels flat, if glibly satisfying. with that in mind, i collected myself and went forward to the second ending, named the NOISE ending in contrast to the aforementioned SILENCE ending. noise and silence are a recurring duality in this game; the celestials influence is marked by noise - the soundtrack, the white noise saved for the climax of the time puzzle and various climactic moments - and silence - the conductor's lessons, the silent ending. noise and silence tend to be indicative of Celestial influence and Chorister respectively. fitting in with this, the Celestials are described near the end of the game by the Conductor as "a cacophony of instruments, [as] long as they keep playing, they stay active". the soundtrack and the organizations fit into this; the soundtrack is evocative and mysterious through its strange warbling atmospheres and near lack of any coherent motifs or melodies. the repeated Choir motifs begin to come together at this point; the Monastery and the Choir - the two groups explicitly mentioned as part of this fictional religion - are both known for their music. music in this context is a deliberate attempt to control the noises which have been here long before humanity and will be here long after we are gone. these places in particular both take advantage of vocal music - utilizing the noise that comes out of our throats in a seemingly futile attempt to reach silence. my interpretation is that this game's religion's attempts to silence the inherent noise to humanity just makes them push back. when Ori pesters Rem about his Rosary or shows ill will towards Celestials, Rem reacts with bouts of bitter spite. with this in mind, let's talk about the second ending, which i see as proving this point.

the second ending, more or less, is achieved by focusing into the lore of this game. throughout the game, there are 4 chances to get Indulgences, which i mentioned near the start of this review. each indulgence, when read in order, tell the story of Ori's sister Mari. as mentioned earlier, they used to play roleplay games in the forest, until one day Mari begins acting erratically after stating, simply, "I'm an alien". she loses interest in playing games, and spends most of her time crying to herself, desparately trying to prove she exists. the last thing she says to Ori that we hear of is a desparate plea for him to join the Choir and her to join the Monastery, and her pleading Ori to come across as ignorant, to reject his "sanity" so the Choir won't hurt him. with this in mind, we get to the penultimate section of the normal game once again, multiple sets of 2 doors. each one is labelled with a sheet with pictures as to what each door corresponds to, but Ori does not look at them himself. looking at them is strictly optional and in normal play all Rem has to do is follow Ori. however, to trigger the NOISE ending after reading all the Indulgences, you defy from Ori once; choosing the path with a picture clearly showing him and Mari role-playing in the forest rather than the path showing him praying which he truly did choose. Ori this entire time seems almost willfully ignorant of the world around him; he doesn't even read the first card, clinging to his Rosary instead - something which combined with the SILENCE ending seems to imply that he knows what's going on here and just chooses to stay ignorant. a similar attitude is present when taking the Indulgences; Ori shows a very visible discomfort whenever he sees one. after this, we enter the final room. i didn't mention it in the first part due to pacing, but game-play wise it's fairly forgettable; you mostly just walk around and interact with things while reading about the lore. the only difference between the final room puzzle in each ending is, when Ori sees the statue holding the lantern, he remarks it looks like Mari.

the reward for beating the final puzzle is three "object" items - primary, secondary and tertiary - which tell a short fable. in the first part, a person is born inside a box. the box is stuffy and cramped, but it is all they know, they cannot do anything but be inside that box. in the second part, the person tries to move inside the box, to no avail. however, they remark on how the outside world is scarier than the box, making special note of how it is silent. in the final part, the box's walls fall apart. the person, instead of living in the outside world, runs and runs until they find another box to hide in.

after this, Ori welcomes Rem after they reunite, except Rem cuts him off. says to stop calling him by that name, that he knows why he's here. and, with the Indulgences read, he does know why we're here. it's at this point Ori snaps. we find out that these Indulgences are less of a distant memory than we thought, all Ori wants is to play in the forest again, or to stop the noise in his head. two seemingly contradictory desires, with one endgame - to be absolute. in dealing with the removal of celestials from humans so often, you begin seeing where the celestials are coming from. the environment the game takes place in is described as a "mindscape". i read this as the mindscape of the "polluted" person, which opens up so many possibilities. personally, i think that Ori is being fed these memories by the celestial, in an attempt to make him snap. as he said in the SILENCE ending, knowing nothing of this world, Celestials don't effect happy or fulfilled people, they can only fill empty spaces.

and, to finish off, we play as Rem, alone. he refers to himself as a name we can't see, saying he is one of the few left of his kind. expecting Ori to try to purify him nonetheless, Rem hides in a closet in his original hotel room - but he hears a distant thud, and hobbling footsteps towards the bathroom. while he does not get a view into what this is, we do.

this grey mass, this weird alien creature (i checked all the cards, as far as we know this is not a celestial) crawls towards the bathroom, and sits itself on Ori's chest, him laying in the bathtub. initially asking it where Rem is, he eventually takes it for Rem. it starts talking to him in a language that to us looks like incoherent symbols and sounds like pure noise, but Ori seems to understand perfectly. as i see it, this is the closest thing to the language of the Celestials - that ever-nagging voice of chaos that this new institutionalized world has no place for. he talks to it about the forest, thanks Rem for helping him remember his past, and at last asks it to tell him a story. watching this scene for the first time was honestly intense, there's this sense of heartbreaking intimacy between Ori and this alien, it's heartbreaking seeing Ori's depths of despair - but at the same time it's relieving to see him get some peace away from this dystopian future. the consequences of this event are not really clarified - in the SILENCE ending the conductor says memories are not shared between mindscape-versions of him and the real version of him, and the text says that the simulation will end and the events of the SILENCE ending will play out "even so", implying this return to this world was sort of inevitable - this strange abberation could even be normal, perhaps it has happened dozens or hundreds of times, reflecting these Choristers interior desires to become one with the primordial urges the Celestials embody before being swept up once again. but at the same time Ori says that only he and the alien will "remember the lie [they] told that day", giving us a bizarre mix of bittersweet and surreal feelings as we close out of the NOISE ending.

after the credits roll, we get one more choice: "Close your ears", or "Listen in to the noise". choosing the first gives you a quick afterword from the author, thanking you for playing the game, and describing briefly the nature of this game's world in very abstract terms. this seems to reflect my feelings on the Choristers and Celestials relations - the final phrase in this afterwords urging the listener to "put down [their] Rosary and laugh" and happily awaits a "futureless future". after everything we've went through, it's honestly a sweet post-script to end on. if we decide to listen in to the noise instead, we get some final clarification on what happened to Mari. we meet an alien - seemingly unrelated to the Celestials or the Choristers - who comes to this world to research humanity. it finds a host body to do this in, which happens to be Mari. during this alien's monologue, it very frequently says "i am an alien", the same phrase Mari said to Ori on that fateful day. it seems to use this phrase when comparing its own mannerisms to the seemingly irrational beliefs of humanity, which it does not understand. we see it talking to Mari in a surprisingly cordial manner, picking her brain about human concepts such as love, mortality and ambitions. closing off the game, she asks the alien what love is. it replies that love is violet.

violet has been a recurring motif throughout the game; everything in it - with the exception of Rem's hair and background in his dialogue boxes - is either black, white, or violet. various things in the games smell like lavender - a purple flower - Ori loves the smell and Rem hates it - though we're not really told why that is the case. the symbolic importance of violet seems to begin here. after the alien tells her that love is violet, Mari paints her fingers violet. from here Ori must have extrapolated this colour everywhere; in his clothes and hair colour, in the colour of blood, you name it. given the potential that the Choristers are all clones of the Conductor based on Rem's comment during the SILENCE ending and all portrayals of Choristers looking like Ori, it's even possible that the Conductor made this religion and made violet significant in it, in attempts to rationalize Mari's condition and immortalize what he saw as one of her final expressions respectively. the fact it is the colour of love makes this extra bittersweet, as the Conductor seems to indoctrinate people into his delusion and curb basic human desires out of people both in the name and colour of love.

one more thing i feel is worth mentioning is the title, the strange little tagline that attracted me to this game to begin with. the censored block plays a role as a sort of carrot on a stick throughout the game. at first it seems to be a blank as you go through the rooms; tomorrow won't come for those without a friend, faith, a Rosary. but, the fourth gate is the block itself, an unknown word. Rem points out it is a 9-letter word, and they wonder about what it could be. during the noise ending he guesses it is "sacrifice". however, the seemingly omnipotent author in the "Close your ears" segment, while thanking you for playing the game, refers to it with only 5 blocks instead of 9. this, in conjunction with the alien's name being 5 blocks, feels to me like the final indicator that the saviours of this world will be in the form of aliens, strangers who break the mold and challenge the Choir's preconceptions of reality. Rem even hints at this himself during the Light and Strategy puzzles, slightly showing pity for Ori's indoctrination into this world.

and, with that said, i'm technically not even done saying all i could say about this game - the colour violets significance in relation to etherane's other games (while looking on etherane's website in an attempt to find their pronouns i saw that each of their series has an associated colour), the backstory of the conductor, the more specific points on organized religion; i could really go on and on.

that, to me, is the greatest strength of a high-quality surrealist work; through the usage of certain symbols and moods you create an explosion of potential, an utter kaleidoscope of fan interpretation that is just a joy to fall into. and even my talking about this game's story for as long as i have kind of betrays my actual experience playing this game - which is taking in its beautiful aesthetic and haunting atmosphere. at just around 2 canadian dollars (i think 1.50 usd) you get so much to think about, if not so much to play, in this lovely bite-sized experience.

(tried out a different writing style for this review, using capitalization as a means of emphasis more than to traditionally structure a sentence. i've used this talking about music before but not so much video games. if you have any thoughts positive or negative on the format, please let me know! and, thank you for reading)

soooooo what do i think

this was very weird i got no idea of what this is supposed to be it almost feels like a prototype for something to come but i guess its pretty self contained so i wouldnt wait for that

after playing HC1 and HC2 and taking a little break to continue HC3 because its getting HEAVY i wanted to check out this one and honestly i didnt have that many expectations but i was still some degree of disappointed

its not bad it just feels very incoherent i wish it was more fleshed out and had some clear direction but still its a cool experience ig ig for a 1 hour game

basically as an rpgmaker game the main gimmick is puzzles . obviously and i grew a bit tired of that but i guess those here are ok somehow so yeah didnt care for that too much but since this kind of games tends to be like that they end up relying on vibes or story and well

vibes ? p cool ? it feels very haunting and claustrophobic and sterile and i guess that was the goal and they succeeded in that department

the story . well . im sure this game got a good story a great one even but its left to rot behind some not so explicit lore and disjointed info dumps that make it almost impossible to follow whats going on in the game unless you read a 50 lines reddit post on how this is an impressive tale of grief and depression or whatever

in general terms youre ori (and the blind forest sorry thats what ive been thinking ever since) and he wakes up in a fucking bath and searches for his rosary and it talks ? weird af whatever he encounters some dead bodies and a boy named remiel (sounds like an angel name but i still have no idea if thats supposed to mean that theyre angels) anyway they try to get out together even though remiel is edgy and tsundere i hate him and i wish this was more homoerotic . umh sorry who said that i meant i wanted this to have more background and the only really interesting aspect is FIRST the worldbuilding around it which is yes very subtle and chaotic but it feels almost dystopic to the point that its almost asphyxiating to live in a world like this and SECOND the backstory with oris sister mari who is dead sorry (is this an omori reference this feels very intentional) but it isnt that clear what happened maybe the wiki lore will help me but im honestly not that impressed to read between the lines about a game that couldve been really good but ends up being kind of whatever

i really tried to love this one since i enjoyed HC a lot i can at least say that i still loved the art style every illustration is a joy to see even tho i still dont know what the fuck is up with the violet colors here and there but whatever its a good contrast with the black and white

overall ? pretty forgettable but etherane is great so i will support this and maybe another playthrough will make me like this better

maybe i was too hard on this

i dont hate it i swear it was just whatever

Playing this felt like when you want to cry but can't. Like sobs stuck in your throat. Like the frustration of dry eyes. Like tears that won't spill.

It is at once blurry and clear. Abstract and straightforward.

I felt like I newly understood something about myself and about the world but couldn't remember what. Like I had forgotten something important.

It's about religion. Life. Death. Freedom. Lies. Guilt. Love. Loss.

I don't know how else to describe it other than this.

What an amazing game.