Imperfect Enlightenment
With Taming Dreams, Cornwall has not only given players a proper introduction to the world of Alora Fane, but also to the new spiritual philosophy that he awakened to not long before. While it was generally well received among the relatively few people who played it, there were a few who were put off by its more cerebral tone. While this did lead to him abandoning the game, it wouldn't dissuade him from trying to solidify his ideas into a proper game. He even created a secondary blog, parallel to the Alora Fane blog, which had the initial purpose of documenting his spiritual growth, but would later serve as a second game development blog. And just a few months after starting this blog, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. You can already guess what it did to the blog's already rather somber tone.
Subsequent posts would cover topics such as the nature of the ego, whether it's possible to change who you really are, and...the runaway success of Pokemon Go. Just because he was facing the concept of his own mortality doesn't mean that things had to be all doom and gloom.
Starting around late 2016, Cornwall came up with the concept for a new game, unrelated to the Alora Fane saga (despite being announced on the blog ostensibly dedicated to it), but serving to further the themes of its existing games.
It would be about a young woman named Oneira, who is depressed because her mom is dead, her dad is neglectful, her boyfriend left her, and to top it off, her parents named her Oneira.
She retreats into her mental world, where she imagines being doted on by her idealized, ambiguously-gendered "Soulmate." A woman known only as "Ego" steals Soulmate away and dares Oneira to get them back. In order to do so, she must explore her mental world, going through areas that are not only based on her past, but are also themed after the False and True Ideals that were very briefly touched on in Taming Dreams. Along the way, she would join forces with a number of her alters in a quest to defeat (or pacify, it's not very clear) the representations of those she perceives as responsible for her suffering.
While Cornwall did post some concept art of some of the characters on his blog, no part of the actual game was ever revealed to the public. No playable demos, no gameplay footage, no screenshots, no gameplay concepts, no nothing. At least he got the game's webpage up and running.
For someone who's philosophy involves not getting too attached to the past, he sure seems to have trouble moving past MARDEK's success.
But that wouldn't be the last we'd see of Oneira and her mental entourage. In 2017, he announced that he was working on a project with the working title of "After Life", later renamed to Divine Dreams. Remember this title for later. Unlike practically everything that he had made up to this point, this was to be essentially a visual novel, even though there's no indication that he had any familiarity with the genre, or even the term itself. The story follows Oneira as she goes on a retreat to an abandoned Buddhist temple, where she and several others get caught up in experiments by a psychologist named Sam Sara (ha!), carried out to explore what lies after death.
Although the reason that he made use of this format was that it would be much easier to make than a normal game, only four episodes of Divine Dreams were made, which can be viewed here. Boy, this guy's really come a long way from the silly game that made fun of RPG tropes, didn't he?
If anything, his vocabulary has certainly broadened since then, which his characters are more than happy to show off. Certainly a shock to those who are somehow, after nearly a decade, still waiting form MARDEK 4.
But speaking of that game, there are two artifacts of Cornwall's pre-Taming Dreams career in the game. Near the end of the first episode, Oneira encounters a Lingon. Don't recognize them by name? They were those bug things that talked weirdly that appeared in Deliverance for all of a minute. Apparently, they had this greater role in the universe that both Deliverance and MARDEK were part of.
In the fourth episode, Oneira meets a wolf girl named Glimmer, who talks like she's in some RP forum. Take a look for yourself:
Like hand in glove, she fits this game's tone!
At first glance, you might not think that she has anything to do with any of Cornwall's previous games. However, have you noticed that she has a sort of canine quality about her? Are there any other canine-like beings that have appeared in Cornwall's games?
That's right, she's not only a counterpart to space dog Solaar (one of Cornwall's first original characters, no less) but also, by extension a transplant from the abandoned Taming Dreams. She would have been an inhabitant of Alora Fane's other petal worlds, who somehow would end up joining Mardek and Rohoph's crew.
Not long after releasing Divine Dreams, he released the prototype to another game, not unlike Taming Dreams in terms of gameplay, but with a far more lighthearted tone. It was called Wavelengths, and starred Oneira and friends once again. Sadly, the game has not been properly archived, so it can't be played at all.
What we've just seen is a trail of unfinished projects left in the wake of Cornwall's spiritual awakening. Not all of his post-epiphany projects were duds, though. As we'll soon see, he would later come out with an unambiguously finished product that espoused his philosophy, albeit in a format that's rather different than what one would reasonably expect from him.