Sword of Seiros<p>The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass was developed by Trinitite Team and released in 2021 for PC. I first wondered how the game ended up on my wishlist but then I remembered that I’ve been checking visual novels with time travelling stories like Steins Gate, and The Sekimeiya got some hits. I can’t begin to describe it. It doesn’t follow the typical character introduction and immersive setting from other visual novels. The character interaction is minimal at first and it immediately throws you into a mystery related to a peculiar stone of great value – The Sekimeiya- discovered in the mountains of Yushibana and now in possession of the Ashiya family. There’s little background story at first but those elements are eventually introduced during the course of events – and there are many – the exception being an adorable side-story at the end of Chapter 1 and a post-chapter where we see what happened in Atsuki and Shiroya’s recent past. </p><p>Character development as we know it isn’t really there because the purpose of the text is purely descriptive, serving as a puzzle guide to unravel the mystery of the Sekimeiya and its powers. There’s an initial group of six people attending an event in the Ashiya tower arranged with the purpose of displaying the stone and the unique possibility of touching it. However, the stone was stored inside a glass cabinet with regulated temperature and should never be held outside. Those were the rules. As expected, things didn’t go as planned because the location the exhibition was being held in was the target of a mysterious attack and everyone got trapped inside without any form of communication with the outside. A black sticky smoke filled the air and everyone passed out. From this moment on we are playing the game from the perspective of Atsuki and every bit of text is him trying to make sense of the stone, exploring every imaginable angle with the intention of using its powers to escape and finding the culprit responsible for the attack.</p><p>Not long into the story, the group discovers the ability to travel back in time by touching the stone at the right temperature. Our main character experiments with the stone in every possible way and analyses every expected and unexpected outcome, every possibility, every action, every result, every variation, every occurrence, every tangent, every theory, every contradiction, every new element, every change, every human contact, and every room. It almost reads like an instruction manual with bits and pieces of dialogue in between to alleviate the pressure, thickening the plot and creating more confusion instead of clarity. The pressure is therefore never alleviated because there’s always something else happening, some overlooked detail that initiates another loop, another try, another discovery, another theory, another sequence, another consequence, another rule, another exception, another question, another possibility, another variation and another contradiction. </p><p>By travelling in time to a few minutes into the past Atsuki can see events from different perspectives and even alter their succession based on what was previously seen. Given that everyone has more or less contact with the stone, there’s plenty of time travelling going on at different periods, even at the same time, because there’s a theory that more than one stone exists, not only in another world line, but in the one they find themselves existing in. However, no one saw it yet, so it couldn’t be confirmed, but in theory it’s possible because it was also possible to see the same person in the same world line. They weren’t wearing the same clothes and there was doubt about the origin of the other person who appeared when their copy was still in the world. Replication was possible with dead bodies, because at a certain point something terrible happened and the exhibition guide died. After some going back and forth, their body appeared in another room wearing the same clothes with labels with the same unique number. If perfect copies are able to coexist at the same time and place, how about the stone and people, and clothes, and objects they touch, and everything that connects and carries with them when they touch the stone? </p><p>One question still lingering in my mind is not exactly related with the position of the puzzle pieces (meaning objects and humans) at the time of a given travel but actually when did every participant started to travel, to where were they taken, from where did they come, and why did they seem to know each other from before the exhibition and having had other experiences and other interactions and then landed on a world line where they were both lacking in fundamental information about the events there and then, but holding unknowable knowledge from the perspective of our character. </p><p>Obviously nobody trusts each other. There’s dead bodies, there’s an attempted murder, there’s a mysterious culprit who can be anywhere <em>whenwhere</em>, there’s a lockdown, there’s a time when the lockdown lifts but the information was given by an untrustworthy person, there’s copies of people inhabiting sections of world lines whose future is unaccounted for, there’s the possibility of changing elements in the past without any apparent achievement, there’s the past days to deal with and those past days are flowing into the past hours and bringing in ghosts from the past, there’s exhaustion and fear and confusion and frustration and madness and blood and endless loops of nothing where clothes, keys, carts, recorders, bags, pieces of paper, even people, pulled by the hands of time and rearranged like a deck of cards are being thrown in by the apparent range the stone possesses. </p><p>And that’s the end of Chapter 1. </p><p>Chapter 2 starts from the perspective of Shiroya and now you can read this text all over again. Now seriously, I’m at the start of Chapter 2 and until now the atmosphere and events have been the same, but it’s known that each chapter from each character’s perspective adds a bit more detail to what’s actually happening. I believe, deep inside I do believe, that I’ll get some answers. I believe that the alpha and the omega is the stone – the main character and thread that connects these events in all their elusive and mutable nature. That, like a ball of yarn, one thread representing time and space and causality, can be rearranged over, under, through, inside, outside, alongside, apart or closer to itself. This is The Sekimeiya for you and I can’t say I recommend it if you’re not that into a very long read, or if you enjoy a structured story with a solid cast, but at least I’d recommend giving it a try because it can really be your jam, you just don’t know it yet. Personally, I’m enjoying the unknown and I’m trying to solve the puzzle of the Sekimeiya to the best of my ability. I don’t know if I’ll have the stamina to see the story from all perspectives but I would like to at least unlock an ending. Getting access to a bit more information would give me a sense of clarity and closure.</p><p><span></span></p><p><a href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/2024/08/14/the-sekimeiya-spun-glass/" class="" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/2024/08/14/the-sekimeiya-spun-glass/</a></p><p><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/blaugust/" target="_blank">#blaugust</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/blaugust2024/" target="_blank">#blaugust2024</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/creative/" target="_blank">#creative</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/gaming/" target="_blank">#gaming</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/indie-games/" target="_blank">#indieGames</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/mystery/" target="_blank">#mystery</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/pc-gaming/" target="_blank">#pcGaming</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/steam/" target="_blank">#steam</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/text-puzzle/" target="_blank">#textPuzzle</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/the-sekimeiya-spun-glass/" target="_blank">#theSekimeiyaSpunGlass</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/time-traveling/" target="_blank">#timeTraveling</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/trinitite-team/" target="_blank">#trinititeTeam</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/video-games/" target="_blank">#VideoGames</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/videogames/" target="_blank">#videogames</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/visual-novels/" target="_blank">#VisualNovels</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/tag/writing/" target="_blank">#writing</a></p>