(this review contains major spoilers for Ray's Palaces, thatgamecompany's Journey, Adam Robinson-Yu's A Short Hike, and Branches's Mount Eerie)
Ray's Palaces is a striking track for me because of what its ending does with the track's arduous climb up the side of a mountain. After a slow grind up characterized by struggling and halting motion and by bouts of falling down and then crawling back up, a tumbling Bosh loses their sled and collapses face-up on a summit marked by a tattered flag. The track ends with the camera zooming out to reveal that our summit isn't actually the mountaintop - that Bosh, unable or unwilling to get up and keep going, is staring up the side of an even taller peak right in front of them. Oof. How do we make sense of what this track does here?
I think there are many meaningful and interesting ways to understand this (for example, if the tattered flag at the end is seen as an eroded representation of the strikingly similar flag symbol which Line Rider uses to indicate Bosh's start position in tracks, we could also read this as a story of Line Rider burnout), and I look forward to interpretive inspiration from the other reviews of this track in this roundup. The most interesting interpretation for me is of Palaces as an existential exploration of struggle and life+death - because three other works I love also represent and explore nature/mountain-climbing, danger/struggle, and life/death, and they all provide their own perspectives in ways that shape how I see Palaces. So I'll take a detour in this review to share what those works mean to me and what I think they say about death - in other words, what they say about life.
The penultimate chapter of thatgamecompany's post-apocalyptic desert-to-mountaintop pilgrimage game, Journey, mirrors the ending of Palaces. High in the snowy mountains, you're constantly being blown back by winds which slow you and even knock you down. As you trudge up a vast and steep hill studded with grave markers, the camera points up at the top of the mountain, looming so close and yet so far. Eventually you collapse face-first into the snow. You're freezing to death in a whiteout, with no remaining hope of reaching the mountaintop after your challenging journey. Depending on the game's multiplayer system, maybe you've just witnessed your companion collapse in front of you. Maybe you're falling side-by-side because the two of you were huddling together in an attempt to generate warmth for each other. Or maybe, having been abandoned long before, you're dying alone. But unlike Palaces, Journey continues past this end. You have an experience, which might be a hallucination or might be real, of being revived by the Ancestors and given a second wind to ascend to the mountaintop in the transcendent final level. Either way, after the end you are sent out through the sky back to the first level of the game. This is an opportunity to start a new journey and face the coming struggles, to build different relationships with other strangers on the internet, to make different choices, to die of cold over and over and find reasons along the way to do it yet again. Through your death and rebirth, Journey invites you to make your own meaning out of your life.
Adam Robinson-Yu's island-exploration/mountain-climbing game, A Short Hike, approaches life and death from a very different angle. Claire, a teenage bird, is taken to an island for a summer trip away from the busyness of the city. Eventually she decides to climb up the island's mountain in order to look for cell reception - previously she'd just been waiting for a phone call at her cabin on the island. The final stretch up the mountain turns out to be difficult, even a bit dangerous due to the freezing temperatures at the high altitude, but eventually Claire reaches the top. As she sits, relaxes, and looks around, we tune in to the sounds of the world in a way we hadn't done before - we listen to the bird calls (which remind me of the bird calls left behind at the start of Palaces), the mountain, and the wind. By now Claire has completely forgotten about cell reception, but her phone suddenly rings and she receives a call from her mother. We learn that Claire was looking for cell reception not out of any lack of interest in the nature and people around her, but instead because she was preoccupied with anxiety about losing her mother in a surgery that day, and about her mother being alone in such a situation. She still isn't ready to accept an inevitable future without her mother. But through Claire's wanderings around the island, she/we explored the surrounding trails and lands; and she/we talked to, helped, shared vulnerable moments with, learned from, and played together with the unique people she/we met along the way. These engagements and detours are what makes A Short Hike so fun to play, and they're what Claire will remember at the end of the day. To wrap up the phone call, Claire's mother encourages Claire to catch a transient updraft at the summit - to ride on the wind even higher than it seemed we could climb, leave the summit we spent so much effort ascending, and glide down around the island while taking in all the people and places we visited before we end our trip and return to the city. A Short Hike gives us an opportunity to imagine (re)orienting ourselves in our impermanent relationships with nature and other people - to shift our attention toward the things which make life livable and meaningful, especially with an awareness of the inevitability of their endings.
Branches's Mount Eerie also does a lot with living, life, dying, and death - more than I want to try to squeeze in here, so I'll just refer you to Ava Hofmann & S's guest review of the track. Go (re-)read it now before you continue, so that I don't have to include its full text in my review here! For reasons Ava & S present in their review, Mount Eerie powerfully represents the fleeting nature of life together with various modes of non-living existence and transformation - processes not only after death, but also beyond a traditional life/death binary, such as for weather and rocks more concretely and for our continuity with the universe more abstractly - in order to build a profound picture of how it beautiful it can be to exist in the world when we situate ourselves in the totality of change-as-nature and existence-as-change.
With these readings of Mount Eerie, A Short Hike, and Journey, let's return to Palaces. Just like cherry blossoms, which are commonly associated with 物の哀れ (mono no aware, which might be understood in English as an awareness and sensitivity to the transience of everything that exists, and a feeling of bittersweet poignancy in that recognition) because of their short and intense presence every year and the delicate beauty in how their soft pink petals fall, the petal falling from the flower in Palaces also points out the impermanence of things. So too does the fraying of the flag at the end: the flag is part of this world, and so it is naturally in a process of decay and transformation. And we might recognize other changes, too: Bosh runs out of their capacity to keep climbing, and their sled falls down the steep side of the mountain, leaving them prone and exposed to the elements at the summit. The smaller peak, which once was someone's goal to climb and plant a flag on (and perhaps was a goal for Bosh to climb), can no longer motivate Bosh's journey here - they've reached the peak now, and they might even be stuck. The mountaintop, which could have been a goal for Bosh to climb, has transformed into a reminder of the limits of striving. And with Bosh still alive and staring at the mountaintop, the track ends as if to ask: Since this is the end of a journey filled with struggle (and maybe pain or even suffering), how will you find meaning for yourself? Since your situation has changed, how will you change? Since you are alive, how will you live/die?
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Palaces sits in a similar place for me as vsbl's Cold Death (CW: suicide) and Ava Hofmann's My Pal Foot Foot (CWs: emotional abuse and animal death/abuse), in the sense that all three raise some pretty heavy questions, and all three make me eager for future tracks from any creator to thoughtfully explore the many dimensions of those questions. A great example of this is what Ava did with her September Trilogy project, which concluded with this past month's excellent on a day like this one (reviewed elsewhere in this roundup). I'm excited for whatever Ray might offer next on the theme of existence.