Curate of Curiosities

So that's it. By my count, fifteen published games (eighteen if you count the no longer available Wavelengths and Embracing Eternity, as well as the not publicly released Alora Fane: Creation), created over the course of a decade and a half. Of these, only two of them can be called finished.

But wait, you ask. It's been five years since his last game! Surely he hasn't quit the business entirely!

Indeed he hasn't, but, sobered by Sindrel Song's lackluster market performance, he not long afterwards considered going back to the game that first put him on the map. No, he didn't decide to make MARDEK 4, to the disappointment of some of his fans, but rather, he rereleased the first few chapters as a single standalone installment on Steam. I don't blame him for making this choice, that game was lightning in a bottle that he had spent the better part of the last decade trying to recreate.

Of course, there was no way that he could milk his previous successes forever. In the years that have passed since releasing Sindrel Song, he came up with the concepts for several new games. As of this writing, none of them have been made available to the public in any form.

Belief: Set in a reimagined Alora Fane, this game would have served as a distant prequel to the re-reimagining of MARDEK. It's plot would be kicked off when a stand-in for Mardek's mother runs into a stand-in for Rohoph and...just read this for yourself. Somebody tell him to lay off the doujins. I don't need to tell you that this idea was quickly abandoned in favor of a game about spreading your own religion. After years spent working on this (he started around the same time Sindrel Song was released), it appears that its current iteration is known as Dreamons, and from the footage that we've seen of it, seems to be about pimp-slapping your opponents until they agree with you.

Divine Dreams: (not to be confused with the browser visual novel) Yet another MARDEK reimagining. It seems that Cornwall has ditched the whole non-violence angle in favor of more of a traditional RPG. Since he kept on refining Alora Fane's lore, some things had to give, among them the main characters' names. That's right, the name Mardek is no longer belong to the main character. In its place is Dayvha, based off of the Hindu and Buddhist devas. Where his apparent fascination with Asian religions came from has yet to be seen.

Atonal Dreams: The planned prequel to Divine Dreams. Continuing the Hinduism theme, its main character, Dayvha's father would be named Savitr. Instead of being a black guy from Wakanda, he would be a Lucen, a sort of horned, demonic creature, yet also in the role of a Seraph, a noble knight. He would explore the dream world while accompanied by Collie, the dog girl from Taming Dreams who only appears for about five minutes, another version of Meraeador who's depressed, and an insane, emotionally repressed monk. It would feature a refined version of the runes and monster-taming system from Taming dreams, yet with the same traditional RPG combat that Divine Dreams would have had. Cornwall has already developed several hours' worth of gameplay for it, and has even created a Steam page for both it ad Divine Dreams. He's even uploaded all the main characters' theme songs:

While playing through all of these games, I have certainly noticed a trend among them, that is reflective of the indie gaming scene as a whole. His early games were made in the mid 2000s, where indie and browser game devs had relatively few resources available to them, so it makes sense that they would be both unpolished and derivative. Their plots, which amount to Final Fantasy fanfiction, remind me of my days browsing DeviantArt around that time. Incidentally, that was when I started getting into Final Fantasy, and RPGs in general, which of course, is what led me to these games in the first place. In the 2010s, the increasing accessibly and variety of game development engines, combined with platforms such as Google Play and Steam opening the floodgates for indie games, not only gave indie developers more of a chance to find a wider audience, but also allowed their quality to approach that of professionally made games. Aside from some minor graphical issues with the UI, Sindrel Song has a very polished presentation.

Another trend involves the themes that the games discussed. Deliverance was a straighforward Final Fantasy pastiche, with little in the way of deeper themes. MARDEK was mostly the same, yet it also had its characters facing a dilemma regarding the necessity of violence. Taming Dreams was when Cornwall really started to explore the world of the spirit, with a whole entire theology and philosophy surrounding it. Sindrel Song, as well as what little he has shown of Soulmate, took things even further, to the point where it felt like a pop psychology textbook with a game attached to it. Again, this trend exists in a number of contemporary indie games, such as Celeste and Omori. The quality of their execution varies, yet Sindrel Song handles it well enough.

Now would be a good time for me to explain the more personal reasons that I have for wanting to document all of Cornwall's games.

On top of showing me how it was possible to experience a console-quality game on browsers, MARDEK showed me that it was possible to produce such games without the need to attach yourself to a professional studio. I already dreamed of creating my own games before them, but this is the game that showed me what could be possible. A few years later, I installed Game Maker Studio, and immediately after reading the tutorials, set to work with my first game. I don't feel the need to bother you about the quality of my own games, instead I'll just direct you to this page.

There's another, less pleasant thing that documenting these games brought into focus, or rather, into sharper focus than usual. I can't recall of the exact name for this phenomenon, but the issue with mobile games, as mentioned in the Taming Dreams page, is a symptom of this. I brought up YouTube Playables before; having played several of them, I can tell you that they're not only rereleases of existing games available on Google Play, but that they seem to be made specifically for 4-year-olds to play on the bus with their moms' iPads.

Speaking of stuff aimed at small children, there's something I nearly forgot to bring up. I'm certain you've heard of Flash games with titles like "Pregnant Frozen Anna Appendectomy" or something like that. In the last years before the death of Flash, games like these started to pop up in dedicated portals meant to appear near the top of results for searches for "girls games" or similar terms. These games tended to involve inappropriate content, the usage of copyrighted characters that would lead the target audience to believe that they were officially sanctioned products, or both. And not even the ceasing of support for Flash put a stop to them, they just switched to HTML5. Sure, MARDEK and its contemporaries such as Epic Battle Fantasy were no stranger to suggestive content, but at least they had substance and depth to them.

Another thing, while looking up Taming Dreams on YouTube, among the videos that I came across were YouTube Shorts (part of the site's initiative to attract the TikTok audience) featuring vaguely spiritual platitudes straight out of a clearance bin self-help book accompanied with AI-generated imagery. Not to sound like an old fogey, but this simply wasn't a problem back in 2010!

Huh, this started off as a nostalgia trip, and finished with a rant regarding the state of Internet content as a whole. This is the type of attitude that years of web-surfing experience gets you.