Completed in the ethereal sense in that while playing a couple custom levels I felt a 'complete' feeling, of which got me very emotional that will be difficult to explain but I'll try to elaborate.

I felt it near the end of the initial level included. It's a really robust intro, a casual warm hand showcasing to you what the level creator can be on offer here. It's completely short and sweet yet goes through everything you might come to expect in games of this time, even a light shocking horror segment, a heavenly vibe above the sky in the snowy mountains etc etc. It tells a full lovely almost wordless story of adventure.

And all of it is to service the spark of creation. Did you ever make custom content for anything? That wasn't really my thing. Even though I grew up around Minecraft, I'm very much a work on others' foundations sort. I like putting things within my own sort of spin rather than creating a whole drum beat from scratch. I like to marvel at what the current of electric creativity has granted others, though. I kept thinking about it since I left the starting 'story' and started downloading others. Loading up a late 00s archive and putting in folders, opening the cavern to more people's stories, from the very notoriously trippy, to calm and relaxing, to dastardly puzzly. And honestly, I bet a lot of the levels I could look at are probably shit who knows. It's very, um, human though. This whole game is very human. The community though it has long since walked away from any nurturing light that kept it growing, is very human. It's like I just stumbled upon a garden of dreams and little bits of people messing around with this same honestly janky editor. The further down the rabbit hole I got the more emotional it felt.

I hope I managed to put the feeling together right. It's very rambly to put together but it's tough to actually describe a sense of a connection, one so strong that it made a wide incredible forest you never knew about, of planters who you may never ever meet.

Reviewed on May 23, 2022


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