The Path of Totality
Lamp Post Projects
In 2017, my family and I got down to Oregon for a total solar eclipse, and it was amazing. It was so amazing that when another solar eclipse came to my wife’s old stomping grounds in the midwest in 2024, we packed up the family for that one, too. There’s nothing at all like it. A total solar eclipse is just several orders of magnitude more amazing than a partial eclipse. For a partial eclipse, it gets a little colder and you can see arcs in the shadows of trees between the leaves. For a total eclipse the sky goes dark and it’s night. And there’s this black orb in the sky where the sun was! And it kind of feels like an actual sphere instead of just a disc.
All this to say that I totally bought into the premise of this game: you’re one of a bunch of pilgrims on their way to see a total eclipse over some standing stones in a fantasy land. You can be on your way for religious or scientific reasons, too, which was kind of fun.
The game also bills itself up front as a romance simulator: you can form a relationship with one of the four NPCs in the game, or (the game hastens to add) you can just be friends with everyone instead.
Then the game… well, does that. It’s a romance simulator with a travelogue background. You get to obstacles, and have to find ways past them, and have a lot of ‘That’s so interesting!’ conversations with the four people who you end up traveling with. I will admit that in the end, it was a bit twee for me, but I can’t fault the game for being exactly what it set out to be. And I have enjoyed romance simulators in, I dunno, the Dragon Age series and the like. This one was passable, I suppose? The PC is your standard cypher, which in theory is to let the player project themselves there more strongly, but, I dunno, never works that well for me. The main characteristic the PC has is that they are just super enthusiastic about everything so you don’t make anyone sad or upset, so everything is always 100% “Wow, that’s great! You’re so brave/interesting/kind/punctual!” Again, I feel like this is pretty par for the course in romance simulators, so once more: game that knows what it is and does that. And it was cute! The object of my affection seemed nice. I guess I just wish that they also seemed a bit more real or rounded. And I wish the PC seemed a bit more real or rounded, too. It kind of felt like the game confused pronouns with a personality.
The obstacles in the journey were similarly reasonable. They all fit into the world, they all had believable solutions, they were all nice to overcome. The ‘lost in the fog’ one was annoying, because I selected ‘stay put’ at least 20 times until the messages about how you had ‘almost passed out’ started repeating before finally deciding the game just wasn’t going to let me stay put, and then clicked on random directions to get myself lost like the game was insisting. And it still took another 20 clicks before finally succumbing to the promised sweet oblivion, so maybe I just didn’t hold out for the whole 50 turns staying in one place it wanted.
The most interesting bit to me came at the very end, when you finally get to see the eclipse. I had chosen ‘astronomer’ so I got to see neat astronomer-themed aspects to the eclipse that I could write about. But at the same time… well, spoilers:
At the same moment that I saw Cool Eclipse Features (which are, indeed, cool! I’ve seen them!), you turn around to look at your companions, and they’re all floating in the air surrounded by blue sparkles! And you’re not! Everyone else was there to commune with a god, and here they are, doing that! And that’s a fascinating worldbuilding feature: the game has given everyone several conversations where they express their general faith or lack thereof in the gods, and some people have more and some less. But here’s tangible proof of the god’s existence! And then for some reason… that’s not interesting to you? You only care about the eclipse? If the existence of gods is supposed to be an open question, why is this tangible proof not interesting to this supposed scientist? And afterwards you just have your ‘that’s so interesting!’ conversations with people like normal about this Encounter With A God that everyone treats as kind of blasé.
I’m probably damning this game with faint praise too much. It was a solid little game; it knew what it wanted to be, and was that thing. The mix of science and religion was a nice touch, even though it didn’t run with that theme very much. And, you know, budding relationships are fun to think about, and are kind of touching.
Also, the game is not actually downloadable, which is a bit obnoxious, but OK.
Did the author have anything to say? I’m going to go with ‘mostly no’, I think. Any place they could have said something personal was instead just left blank or generic, whether it was the junction of science and gods, or ‘how relationships form’.
Did I have anything to do? Explore a bit, and be reminded of how cool eclipses are in real life.