On the eve of Lonetrail ending, I have some sad thoughts about preservation of media in this game.
The event is amazing. The effort and love put in to this story and all the little details is beyond me. I’m really glad that it’s gonna go straight into the Intermezzi so that anyone who picks up this game or missed the event gets to experience it.
But a big part of this event is going to be missing. The lobby, for one thing, is a huge part of the story’s lingering emotional power. The narrative touched my heart. It made me cry.
But what made me break down, what destroyed me, was finishing that final story segment and seeing this
Turn into this:
And just sitting there, full of pain and wonder and real, actual grief, reflecting on what had just happened as I sat there in the dark with my headphones on, totally immersed in the lonely and hopeful and Ad Astra, reframed by this new context into something that was also terribly and beautifully sad.
It didn’t fully comfort me. But it gave me the refuge to feel the things I needed to feel, drifting and alone.
Throughout the rest of the week, the little missions from the Investigation section helped me return to and slowly process my feelings, with little bits of additional story and context.
And each time I opened the event, that devastating splash of Kristen dunked me back into my emotions, to give them another go.
This is the only piece of art I’ve consumed that comes with its own aftercare and damn if I didn’t appreciate it.
I probably don’t need to explain this whole experience to you in detail, because y’all reading this have (hopefully) already played the event and experienced that for yourselves.
But people in the future playing this event are not gonna experience that aspect of this multimedia piece of art, because these parts of an event do not show up in the archive.
They won’t experience the guy saying “*A new age is upon us!*” getting replaced by the empty billows of space as Kristen’s pod drifts outside terra’s starpod.
You can probably find it, in recordings. But searching down something on the Internet to see what used to show up does not hit the same as getting greeted by the new intro and splash whenever you return to the event. You’ll be like “oh yeah I bet that was cool” and not “Oh, I’m not okay.” Or whatever your reaction to that piece of the art in its proper place would be.
I don’t really have much else to say on the matter.
I just think that’s sad.
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