Didn’t expect the first line of this episode to be from my favorite El-P song lmao let’s go

…to the trope of a crotchety old person on the edge of town with heretical beliefs, but something about this game made Ill Peter and Ottilia really feel like the last keepers of an ancient flame, like something important would be lost if their beliefs aren’t passed down. Man what a game.

That same sense of long shared history to the Christianity of the village also does a lot of work to make the Alpine paganism of Perchta and the Wild Hunt feel truly ancient, like a part of the land that’s nearly lost to all the civilization built on top of it. I’m pretty inoculated at this point…

And I usually could not give less of a shit about offending Catholics (or any Christians), so it’s a hell of a trick that the game made me feel that way.

there’s a sense of a long shared history in how habitual all the Catholic rituals of the village are, and the Baron prancing in and insisting on arguing about Martin Luther with anybody who would listen does actually feel gauche and out of place in that context.

And the way that the daily rituals and idioms and whatnot feel so deeply ingrained, to the point that it doesn’t seem like the villagers even necessarily think about them as they’re doing them, really makes you feel how cataclysmic the Protestant Reformation must have been —

I don’t have to believe that there’s any god listening to the characters as they pray, what matters is the sense that anybody in Tassing can sit down at anybody else’s table and feel comfortable and welcomed because of that shared ritual.

…language and rituals and customs, which elevates it from a set of people living next to other into a community. Like, there’s something really cozy about the way that the game forces you to sit through lunch and dinner every day, and at every meal everybody says grace in basically the same way —

(The closest we get to the latter is Vácslav’s little rant about how Lucifer is actually the demiurge, but I’m super into Gnosticism, so I was clapping like a seal for that whole segment anyway.) Instead the game seems more concerned with how Christianity provides the village with shared…

…the game doesn’t seem to be concerned at all with whether Christianity is actually *true* — there’s no supernatural elements, no lucky coincidences where it winks at you and goes “what could that have been? hehehe”, and none of the characters ever really question or reaffirm their faith.

out how to pay for food and stabilizer because you met these eco-ancoms” is just so good. I can’t remember playing a game that made it so satisfying both narratively and mechanically to just join and play your part in a community, as opposed to being the classic protagonist-messiah

Plus, completing Feng’s quest is how I was introduced to the Greenway in the first place, so those threats disappeared and I joined the commune at around the same time. And the combined vibe shift of “you’re free from all those threats” and “you no longer need to spend most of each cycle figuring

In another game the endgame would be a forced confrontation with one of those threats, and then there would be a little epilogue that just tells you about how you’d found your community and made friends. And I love that CS instead lets you experience that as a whole half of the game

but once you complete Feng’s quest (which I did in the midgame, not sure how universal that is) all those threats go away and you can spend the rest of the game just building community and making friends

I also love how early on in the game you’ve got all these stressful timers, like “somebody big and bad is coming soon”, “the psycho bounty hunter is demanding that you pay his bar tab in the next five days or he’ll turn you in”, etc

You can join a commune! It’s an entirely positive choice! If you do a few chores every day all your needs will be met!

I know I have like eleven followers and I'm pretty sure they're all bots, but if a human does actually see this: any recommendations for a non-Google alternative to Youtube?