interpreting art is a skill I don't have a lot of confidence in.
now, don't get me wrong, I can trust myself to receive meaning from words and even, on occasion, reading between the lines, but when it comes to taking abstractions and metaphors, especially visual or non-verbal ones, and deriving meaning from them, I struggle.
eclipsium trades entirely in wordless metaphor. I could do my best to describe it to you here, beat by beat, and it would still not be encompassed. spoilers are rarely ever something I worry about, and here, I only briefly hesitate to talk about what lays within because interpretation is one of those things that is colored heavily by impressions you carry with you.
I don't know what this game is About. I can't even gesture at pretending I get what any of this means without several caveats about how clueless it left me. to me, engaging with Art is hard. it's about what it makes you feel, what it makes you think about, how it connects to other experiences you've had, and other art you've touched on. I feel like I'm faking every time I try to step outside my niche of JRPGs and anime bullshit. I still feel things, obviously, I just don't dissect those feelings very often outside of thinking about games, and rarely do I touch on art games. one of my many flaws being that I am a Gamer (derogatory), of course.
what did I feel as I watched the player character cut out his tongue to exit the first room of the game? curiosity. a burgeoning sense that I would be asking what all this symbolizes from start to finish. not ever complaining, just bewildered. a slow trudge out of an operating room, into the waiting room that would greet me every time I died. a radio that you can shut off, but that turns itself back on when you look away. what intrusive thought did this muzak stand in for?
where did my mind go when I approached the smoke-spewing spires of the meat-processing cathedral? what does this mean to say about religion? what does it actually manage to say? I don't know. blood drips off of carcasses, steam puffs out of pipes, and the creak of metal echoes through the labyrinthine vents. have you ever thought about the claustrophobia of caving? you ever watch that jacob geller video about caves and the depths of the sea? I found myself thinking about it while I wormed my way through caves that were too narrow to just crouch in... and then vents that were similarly slim. the industrial equivalent of those claustrophobic stretches of cave where it's impossible to do anything but inch your way along on your belly. the factory is engineered, but that doesn't mean it's merciful. blood already pools here. what's another corpse?
what common thread to find when the ocean is drained? I thought back to dragon's dogma 2, where the ocean itself was a threat, and when the world truly went to shit, the oceans vanished, leaving vast swathes of land teeming with history and danger in equal measure. I thought back to tiny tina's wonderlands, where mister torgue nuked the ocean into non-existence. to remove the world's water is to destroy a world that lives alongside our own.
the water in eclipsium drains with alarming speed to reveal a path forward on the seabed. it, too, is littered with corpses. fish still twitching as they drown. whales in various states of decay. the end of the path is a whale corpse larger than the rest, its stomach burst and its innards splayed like the roots of a tree, ribs a yawning maw, beckoning you into the wet and writhing darkness.
a heartbeat has been your guiding star this entire time. a slow pulse, pounding from an illuminated stand in the distance, gone silent when you fall into obstacles and complications, and, despite the unease of hearing a heartbeat in a game this tense, it's always a sign that you're moving forward. when you finally approach the tree holding up an organ your character gave up early on, it inverts, and you with it, revealing a towering bramble of pulsing flesh, the veins and arteries undulating as your boat weaves between them.
the pounding grows loud, but slow. the unease settled as my own heart calmed.
in the ending sequence, the tempo of the heartbeat is matched by a clock in the waiting room, stuck repeating the same second, the mechanism clicking twice to a heartbeat rhythm. it's only when the waiting room door opens to reveal the silhouette of the woman you've been seeing, fleeing from, and chasing that the clock finally progresses.
what does that mean? what does any of this mean? I don't know. I'm not some lore youtuber. the anxiety of waiting for something you have no control over, of being willing to sacrifice anything to keep someone safe, of agonizing over all the possible outcomes of every little thing... that's what I got out of the vibe of this game. I couldn't tell you what it all means, but I sure as fuck felt it all. and I liked it. I really enjoyed the game.
also the OST slaps! I might pick it up at some point.