I do think once you sort of break through the literal brick wall on the edge of the map that SOME of the resource frenzy the game is going through sort of alleviates itself. However, it then opens up to other problems.

Just to finish off my issues with the management system, you eventually do unlock the WORST little minigame yet which is the hammering materials into sheets thing. The game is like, yeah, every material has a different way to hammer! but this is not true. They all take an extremely long time, some of them just take more extremely long times.

Whatever-- by the point you need to use it if you've been blowing your dick off gathering shit in mines and on islands you probably just have enough to finish off the last few houses.

Here's where the real downside to the game really sets in.

Once you finish the various animals' fetch quests/upgrades, it seems like they're suddenly desperately reaching for reasons to exit the story.

Just for comparisons' sake, here's one that I feel was done well: Alice. Alice is clearly suffering from a degenerative condition that makes her life harder every single day. Her house has to be on the ground, she loses the ability to recognize the player, just total loss of quality of life. At the end she barely seems cognizant of the fact that she's moving on.

However, by comparison, many of the others have pitiful if any conclusions to their stories.

Stanley seems to barely be opening up about the state of his life when he suddenly decides that due to lackluster feedback on his play that it's time to forgo the afterlife and give up. He's the spirit of a child so immaturity is part of his characterization, but it is so weakly presented that it seems like the writer (or writers, I'm unsure) just said, okay, Stanley is complete and you need an upgrade flower, time to hit the road.

Similarly, Bruce and Mickey just give the fuck it reasoning as well. You are tasked with obtaining an obscene number of items, only for them to just say, ah we should never have worked with you, let's roll. And this FITS with how they've been presented, but is it as GOOD as something like Alice?

And I'm not suggesting, for instance, that every single character needs to have a tear-jerking conclusion to their stories, but in so many instances the game just seems to be opening up their narrative before they give you the time to go speech.

I couldn't help but think throughout the latter half of the game that perhaps it would have been better if there were fewer spirits fleshed out in more elaborate and interesting ways. Stanley's was just appalling to me. I'm not even really particularly clear on what exactly happened to him. The game can be so dense with metaphor and vagueness sometimes to its own detriment. I have zero clue what the dragons actually represented in Summers story. Traditionally this is a trope that suggests addiction, yet she doesn't speak of them that way at all, leaving her passing also in very much a ??? kind of situation.


And then, after all that, you unlock the third cosmic owl cutscene. The owl says next time you come back to the gate, it'll be time for you to go. 

At this point, we know nothing about the player character other than some EXTREMELY basic images that appear on galactic glass cubes. She appears to have been either very sick, or a nurse. That's all I can really garner. At first I imagined these were some images of the character we were bringing to the goodbye gate, but this is not the case.

You can then end the game at any time, leaving characters on your boat entirely unresolved. And-- what did it all mean?

It's hard to say. The game is a mess but it has so many other things actually going for it... I don't know man. I'm conflicted about the whole thing.

I don't hate it, but I wish it was better.