This review contains spoilers
A cat that needs to survive a hostile world that visually reminded me of something like Out of this World or other cinematic platformers from the 90s, but a very different one fundamentally to them, it's a world that was once obsessed with trascendence and technological advancement to the point the population destroyed itself with a robot that after everything was no more, still fed his ego with new creations to the point he lost his mind, even if he never means to have caused harm.
The cat can't be preocupied with his ego though, throughout his extremely endangered existance, he gets tired of repeating neverending cycles of hunting, eating and sleeping in search for his family, to the point he reaches for the dephts of the earth in his neverending quest with no results but he does find a place deep below to give a higher meaning to his now meaningless life after never finding his loved ones. It's left for the player to interpret what the metaphysical ending represents for the cat, one that reminds me of 2001: a Space Oddysey.
One dialogue I got with the robot that reads pearls says the fluid the cat sinks into is the sedimentation of life forms to the core of the earth instead of actual magma or minerals like you would assume. If those are the sediments of organisms, to me, he found the spirits of his ancestors. He finally found a sort of family after all that hard work, even if he had to leave the world behind. It was a little creature apparently following its insticts the one who got what the gods of technology wanted, while them at the end of the day, will be the ones still on the place they were abandoned in, the ones repeating the things they were programmed with, no reason to do so anymore. Some of them may even still nostalgically lament what they did lose with the world in such a state, but it's the cat what allowed them to move forward.
The cat can't be preocupied with his ego though, throughout his extremely endangered existance, he gets tired of repeating neverending cycles of hunting, eating and sleeping in search for his family, to the point he reaches for the dephts of the earth in his neverending quest with no results but he does find a place deep below to give a higher meaning to his now meaningless life after never finding his loved ones. It's left for the player to interpret what the metaphysical ending represents for the cat, one that reminds me of 2001: a Space Oddysey.
One dialogue I got with the robot that reads pearls says the fluid the cat sinks into is the sedimentation of life forms to the core of the earth instead of actual magma or minerals like you would assume. If those are the sediments of organisms, to me, he found the spirits of his ancestors. He finally found a sort of family after all that hard work, even if he had to leave the world behind. It was a little creature apparently following its insticts the one who got what the gods of technology wanted, while them at the end of the day, will be the ones still on the place they were abandoned in, the ones repeating the things they were programmed with, no reason to do so anymore. Some of them may even still nostalgically lament what they did lose with the world in such a state, but it's the cat what allowed them to move forward.
3 Comments
The robot that used to monitorize industrial facilities had to confront the fact the people that made him and the rest of sentient beings left currently in the planet had already trascended and left them behind. This friend of the robot that reads pearls is scared of dying because as a robot he won't reincarnate like the player can and is not designed to trascend. That's why the world is in the garbage state it was left it, because of his experiments to prevent his shutdown: Ironically he considers himself like some kind of a god but he is stuck in a room without being able to do anything while the "lower life form", the protagonist is able to freely roam the world and is the one that finally achieves trascendance unlike him and the robot that reads pearls. There's a lot of influences from Hinduism, I believe the ending then means the characther could leave his ego behind unlike the robots, and achieved a kind of Nirvana by doing so
I like this one pearl:
"It's a Small Plate, a little text of spiritual guidance. It's written by a monk called Four Cabinets, Eleven Hatchets. It's old, several ages before the Void Fluid revolution.
Like most writing from this time it’s quite shrouded in analogies, but the subject is how to shed one of the five natural urges which tie a creature to life. Namely number four, gluttony.
It is basically an instruction on how to starve yourself on herbal tea and gravel, but disguised as a poem.
Now of course when Void Fluid was discovered these methods proved obsolete, as it was more easy just jumping in a vat of it to effortlessly leave this world behind.
There were some horror stories though... That if your ego was big enough, not even the Void Fluid could entirely cross you out, and a faint echo of your pompousness would grandiosely haunt the premises forever.
So even when the Void Fluid baths became cheaper, some would still starve and drink the bitter tea."
"It's a Small Plate, a little text of spiritual guidance. It's written by a monk called Four Cabinets, Eleven Hatchets. It's old, several ages before the Void Fluid revolution.
Like most writing from this time it’s quite shrouded in analogies, but the subject is how to shed one of the five natural urges which tie a creature to life. Namely number four, gluttony.
It is basically an instruction on how to starve yourself on herbal tea and gravel, but disguised as a poem.
Now of course when Void Fluid was discovered these methods proved obsolete, as it was more easy just jumping in a vat of it to effortlessly leave this world behind.
There were some horror stories though... That if your ego was big enough, not even the Void Fluid could entirely cross you out, and a faint echo of your pompousness would grandiosely haunt the premises forever.
So even when the Void Fluid baths became cheaper, some would still starve and drink the bitter tea."
Blowing_Wind
1 year ago
https://rainworld.miraheze.org/wiki/Pearl/Dialogue