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Upon further reflection, boh of my own experience of floating about inside the General System Bus and the game at large, I think I've found another layer on why this part feels so impactful. Random Gods doesn't even sound like music, not right away. It starts with electronic humming, this gargantuan machine simply making calculations and producing noise. Then you start noticing the melody emerge - whether or not it registers as Sundown right away is not necessarily important, just that the mind is finding the melodic qualities in the middle of this chaos. It feels like your mind is playing a trick on you, trying to find something greater in the surrounding area. It's the impersonal, sterile inhumanity of the machine performing its functions meeting the very human tendency of searching for, and finding, patterns in everything we experience. The frantic shifts of the sounds make it feel chaotic and confused, Sundown gives it a feeling of sadness and wistfulness, and deep electronic rumbling gives it an undercurrent of anger. Random Gods *is* Five Pebbles as a character, as much as the superstructure we traverse is Five Pebbles' body; it transmits the... Aura or feel of his character in the melody itself. Confused, sad, and angry. I was very impressed when I arrived at the Bus, as it helped communicate the sheer power of Five Pebbles as a computer, and in contrast made me feel so much more sad for Looks To The Moon, as we see her reduced to just her puppet and a handful of neuron flies. Then we see the scenery from atop The Wall and see that, not only is an iterator so immense they can have a city built on them, but there are so many other iterators away in the distance. Rain World is an amazing experience, and I am glad I decided to play it.

got damn the five pebbles theme still makes me goose bump all over

I cannot stress enough the important of CONTRAST in art. Contrast provides the ability to set your intended perspective in relation to another with ease, it draws the attention of the viewer effectively. Contrast can be used in many different things, like music, visuals, colors, gameplay.... like when you are suddenly tossed into the anti gravity environment in contrast to the natural environments you're used to. Learning how to traverse it is like playing a whole different game.

Gosh I could absolutely drown in the "Random Gods" soundtrack. Entering that room and having it on full blast for the first time- there will never be another moment like it. I'd give anything to relive that feeling again man, it was perfect.

I didn’t go through the bus, I took the wall. It’s a heck of a trek, but I had my worm from underhang and that made it easier than I think it was supposed to be. For once, I felt like I was actually getting past that lowest rung on the food chain. Get to the top and marvel as the sight of other massive superstructures in the distance, no more rain timer, it was something else. And then I take the roof, desolate (except one dang white lizard. Jerk.) and make my way down a pipe. No gravity. No gravity?? And lasers and lights and other entirely new look for everything! I’ve gone from a decaying civilization, slowly but surely overtaken by flora and fauna, to this? Where am I, what is this?? I go right, the only path that isn’t back where I came from, and find a pipe after bumbling and bumping around in the new zero-g environment, feeling like I’m all at the beginning again with barely an idea of how to move. And then it’s so loud, and there’s lightning and lights and dozens of pearls floating around a small figure, floating or held by an arm or something, and I have no idea what’s going on. Then it all shuts off when I fall, he makes some noise before grabbing and making me understand what he says, and explains everything without really meaning to. I didn’t know what a cycle was, really. I barely knew anything aside from how to scrape by at this point and now he’s telling me where the “end” is. Then, unceremoniously, I’m tossed back out where I came from before I can even try and go through the other pipe. When folks talk about Cthulhu and such, this is what I imagine it has to be like. A simple creature suddenly given a huge burden of knowledge, far beyond what they were ever expected to achieve, then tossed right back into its day to day struggle, unable to share that burden, unable to forget.

It is always a good day when your favourite tree man uploads! (Except when he uploads a video that spoils a game that you would want to play later so you can't watch the video until you complete the game but you never complete the game so you never get to watch the video.)

Ok hear me out though, oneshotting spikes is really funny.

blasphemous 2

Possible deadcells video soon?

6:26 A double jumo was originally intended However they just decided to cut it Also nice video Pretty great points

Great seeing you post again! Honestly liked the video.

Silksong: Understanding the patience.

i made like 90% of this essay last september/october, and then got super busy & burnt out. planning on releasing more essays very soon, and in fact i have a short & cozy stardew valley essay in the works - until then, you can find me on twitter.com/Alex_Pinetree

first and that my thumbnail :) and FACE REVEAL

the song random gods has always been really impactful just in the depth and discordance of it, but it wasnt until now that i realized it has the same motif as sundown and moondown. deeply emotional about it now. again.

I’ve listened to all the tracks with the opening melody and it’s very powerful, yet soothing. It perfectly captures the bittersweet and breathtaking feel Rain World has. It’s relaxing, but holds some amount of tension. It’s sad, but carries hope. It opens and it concludes. It does everything the game needs it to. It contrasts itself in its usage. It’s used for moon and pebbles, two characters who are so similar, and yet could not be more different. The opening of the game and the goals it presents are the polar opposite of those presented in the ending. Its used so well in every instance. When used in moon’s chamber, it makes you feel sad for her. You look at this creature and hear that melody and it just makes you sad. But compared to Pebbles, it brings out fear in a player, even if they can’t help but admire him. But it brings out the same sympathy for him especially if you really get into the lore. Pebbles and moon make me unreasonably sad if you can’t tell

I enjoyed the video. It's a shame it wasn't on my feed 2 years ago. Good luck with your channel, if you're still doing it.

I can say some reasons why it felt so powerful to me in steps: -The game is lonely. You are alone, everything familiar is dead or lost, and mechanisms seem to have mostly ceased. -You spend hours, dozens of hours traversing a harsh landscape with animals actively hunting you. -You come across, most likely, Moon, to show you that there is something bigger in this world you don't understand. -Lastly, before coming into the area, you likely encounter memory crypts, the leg, the underhang, etc... which are some of the most difficult parts of the entire game. Then when you enter this area it's dead silent, you know you're at the peak of the journey, you can feel you're approaching something big. It confuses you with all this anti-grav, power cells, neurons, weird little machines, etc...to double down on the "approaching something big" feeling. Of course, there's still a couple ways to die in here, but for the most part, it's empty. It immediately releases all the tension and allows the player to start to think about the game. So what happens when you enter that room with Five pebbles? You realize you've found what you're looking for. You have a goal, the world is not dead yet, you finally have the biggest piece of the puzzle that you've been missing. And the game sends you out of his chamber to ponder on it, with Random Gods playing to give that existential melancholy feeling. It's a good moment and it forces the player to THINK about what just happened.

Great video!

I think for me the second time entering Pebbles's interior was extra powerful. Realizing that all those little light flashes are some guy's thoughts is something else, it makes you feel small and insignificant in the best way possible. Paired with the music, it paints a beautifully melancholic picture.

I know that I am very late to this video but I just must say that this probably is the best or second best video about roguelike design that I have ever seen, definitely hope you make more stuff!

Best intro ever. Thanks.

One of my favroute moments in rainworld downpour is when you are playing as rivulett and you go into memory crypts, the first screen looking normal but then you see a rot cyst. It realy shocked me and it was super well done

there's no feeling quite like hearing "random gods" for the first time. also, a small trivia i really like. the downpour DLC adds another track tied to Moon called "random fate", which is a slower version of "sundown". it's grim, almost menacing, but very, very sad. and in the context of the game, the title of it just Hits. Pebbles, who randomly decided to play a god, being the reason of Moon's tragic fate.

I'm pretty good at predicting if channel blows up, did that with 15-20 channels. I'm telling you, keep making videos in this style, and you will get thousand of subscribers in a matter of few months.

Nice video, keep up the good work

I think the contrast of Random Gods and Moondown is even more emphasized with the Downpour DLC and Random Fate. Random Gods is an angry, loud, chaotic track, which is perfect for Pebbles, who's very frustrated and angry. So angry he distorts the theme to be almost unrecognizable Random Fate plays in Looks to the Moon's general systems bus as she's dying due to Pebbles. It still has that grandness and chaos of the original track but is much more calm. The Moondown motif is much slower, but still recognizable. Random Fate contains no anger like Random Gods, just sadness and pain to distort it. Moondown is the purest form of this theme, only distorted by loneliness, Moon by the time we hear this is too broken to be angry or sad anymore.

8:18 Oh, shut up! You don't get to decide what a "roguelike experience" is when you haven't actually experienced any real roguelikes. You casual losers fight for a definition of a genre you never even played!

I did a spit take at your quote about fighting fire with fire ending up with a bad noita run been there way too many times.

this is a very very good video that touches on views i wouldnt think to ever actually hear anyone voice

on my first playthrough i "walked" into the general system bus, and I had my music volume all the way up for the game. the sheer scale, and contrast, along with the motif, and powerful music genuinely brought me to tears how beautiful the game is, and this was even before i learned about the story of the game. everytime i visit pebbles, I always feel emotional because of this room

u should make a new vid for downpour

I've been looking for a video analysis of these aspects of Undertale for far too long. This is fantastic and puts into words exactly what we all experienced when we first went through the game. It's criminal that this analysis of the game is so under represented/discussed, considering it's such a fundamental aspect of Undertale's presentation. Well this video may have been buried but I want you to know it still helped me finally resolve my confusion and feelings about this game after 7 years. Going online it almost felt like people played a completely different game!

Honestly, despite it being considerably more difficult, I always go the intended path to get to pebbles because this scene never fails to instill a sense of pure awe and it never gets old. Also for neuron flies

I never realized that the title theme was in Five Pebbles main room but I always found the rooms leading to him to be breathbreaking and it really makes you feel small in comparison to Pebbles because you are inside of him and it feels like an entirely different world.

When I entered 5 pebbles, my expectation was that I’d somehow destroy the entire computer with 5 pebbles!

check out the downpour dlc, it has a lot more moments like this!

I feel like this room also contrast the entrance to the void where they’re both 0G environments but you are swimming in opposite directions. In five pebbles there are black and red synapses which are replaced with the white and gold void worms. It also symbolizes the different ideologies were as the ancients where sinful and did not want to return to traditional roots in order to ascend instead relying on supercomputers that couldn’t even find a solution, the void is the original solution and you descend into the void showing the ancients ideas about ascension were wrong and misplaced

as an isaac player, i agree, play another game

You pointing out how the Sundown theme is repeated in other songs made me realize it is also in "Pictures of the past" during the aria midway through. Or at least something quite similar to this. Would that make it qualify as the leitmotif of the game?

i think that the best way to describe five pebbles is it's a region that feels the exact same way to experience compared to other regions as rain world feels to experience compared to other game. rain world is an extremely different experience because it flips so many small things you've gotten used to in games on their head, which is exactly what five pebbles does. there is no more rain, no more combat, no more of the movement you're used to. the otherwise gritty, muddy, almost organic environments you've seen are replaced with clean, mechanical rooms that almost feel like going through a giant alien spaceship

I died countless times in Unfortunate Development trying to pass through, but this room was worth all the frustration

0:14 That was sexist as hell

I'm shocked this only has 1.2k views? Nice video and I recognize all the Rain World soundtracks <3

I don't understand how I know SO many people that praise literally everything else about the game EXCEPT THIS MOMENT. This is IT. This is the ENTIRE BUILD UP of the game. The entire reason shit's happening in the game to begin with. Yet people shrug this off, and swipe it under the rug saying that the echo's are somehow more impactful than this is. HOW? Some undead space octopus that regrets his decisions that's now just stuck in place and talks crypticly to you, but otherwise does nothing? How is that more interesting than the literal LAST puzzle piece that you needed to put a picture of the entire world together? Makes no sense to me.

Five pebbles amazed me, such a beautiful machine. It inspires such curiosity, the entire game. So much wonder. It is a masterpiece.

I had to watch this twice, and on the 2nd time, I noticed the menu theme at the beginning of the video. Nice detail.

As soon as you mentioned design space in puzzle games, The Witness is immediately what popped into my head. What a good example to demonstrate this concept, great job!

On my first playthrough I found moon first and ate all of her neurons. After entering five pebbles and being swarmed by the mere numbers of them, I was so, so sorry. I have never done that again

I actually feel kinda sad that I didn’t go through this route on my playthrough. The karma requirement from underhand was just too high, and I couldn’t reliably get it. So instead, I just went up the wall and then straight to pebbles. Next run I do, I’ll go this way.