Curate of Curiosities

With Miasmon, we have just been introduced to the world of Alora Fane.

While the game in the state that it was released gives us a tiny glimpse of how the world was structured, there is far more to it than what can be gathered from an unfinished 3-hour-long demo.

Here's the rundown: you know how both MARDEK and Deliverance had an elemental system, where every single character and creature had an elemental attribute? Alora Fane has something similar, but they're called sentiments, and instead of natural forces, they are based on emotions. They are Bliss, Fear, Courage, Sorrow, Creation, and Destruction.

The gods, who are actually aliens, created the world, consisting of a central Nexus and six self-contained petal worlds that were connected to it, which were each populated by a different sentient species. They preached empathy and nonviolence to their followers. Fracture (the world that Miasmon was set on) was associated with the Destruction sentiment, and naturally, its inhabitants blew the place up, which not only left it in the devastated, yet somehow still habitable, state we see in Miasmon, but also caused the gods to abandon the world entirely.

Now, a bit of background. Cornwall had been working on a reboot of MARDEK since 2014, at least. It was in that same year that he also constructed a new site that would be devoted to his new projects. At around the same time, he tried to make a successor to Beast Signer that was a platformer/RPG hybrid, as well as an RPG sequel to Clarence's Big Chance, where Clarence and his new girlfriend stumble their way through turn-based social interactions. There was also this quest maker called Alora Fane: Creation that seems to have seen limited official release, but can still be played here.

Remember how he was worried about violence in RPGs? in December of 2014, he brainstormed a non-violent form of RPG combat, where, instead of using weapons and magic to slay monsters, you would use sentimancy, a form of emotion-based magic, to build up rapport with monsters to gain their essence, which you could then equip to use when facing other monsters. And instead of numerical stats, they would have runes which signify their personality according to different axes.

A few weeks after that, after much internal turmoil, he reached an epiphany. The crux of it is that one's mind does not necessarily equate to its owner, but rather, is a malicious parasite that keeps you from attaining true happiness. Seems like a very stereotyped version of Zen Buddhism, but okay.

From then on, he set out to incorporate this revelation into his in-development project. It was noticeable in MARDEK that it's main character didn't seem to have a personality to speak of. This game sought to explore this; before Rohoph took up residence in his head, Mardek had an almost entirely empty mental landscape.

In 2015, the first episode of Taming Dreams was released exclusively for Android. While it was received positively overall, there were still some who complained about it not being the next chapter of the browser game.

Taming Dreams was Cornwall's first, and so far only, game for mobile devices. While it's not particularly hard to find the installation files elsewhere, the game will not install on newer versions of Android, including both of the Android devices that I have. Even if you somehow do get it working, Cornwall had the bright idea of using a cloud service to handle save data, so even that doesn't work anymore.

I guess if I wanted to, I could have given this page a clickbaity title like "The MARDEK Successor You Can't Play Anymore" or something.

Aware of this, rather than update the (still-unfinished) game, he decided to upload a playthrough of the game's first two episodes on his YouTube channel.

Episode 1

Episode one, "Dashing Dreamers" began in a very similar way to MARDEK's first chapter. But instead of a scrolling text dump, there's just a few lines describing the games themes:

Our minds are monsters
that guard the gate to peace

Our dearest dreams drive us
To a future out of reach

The gods shall bring salvation
unless they're in our heads...

You have Mardek and Deugan playing make-believe. Except that there are two main differences: the first is that Deugan isn't playing himself, but rather Enki, Mardek's absent father. Secondly, their initial conversation takes a turn for the philosophical, as Mardek's unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to play a role other than himself results in some friction.

From there, we go on to the game's combat. Except it's not actually combat at all, it's called agitation, and its purpose is to make peace with your inner demons, as I've mentioned. The very first monster you face is even a generic, store-brand Monster, just like in MARDEK. Like a lot of things in this game, it's both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

And so indeed, is the structure of the starting mission. Once again, you are exploring a monster-filled dungeon, except instead of saving a princess, you are trying to reach the realm of the gods to have your wishes granted.

Over the course of the dungeon, the player is introduced to two new mechanics, runes and excitement. Runes signify a given character or monster's disposition, which can be changed during agitation, and are divided into three axes: Eccentricity (between Real and Abstract), Sensitivity (between Tough and Feeling) and Vivacity (between Jolly and Grave). Each sentimancy has both a sentiment and a rune, for example, both Mardek and Enki use the Ecstacy sentimancy, which has the Bliss sentiment and the Jolly rune, while the monster that they face in this part of the tutorial has the Grave rune, so they'll have trouble building rapport with it at first.

Excitement is how much a character is emotionally stirred, and determine how effective their sentimancy is, as well as how much sentimancy affects them. If you're finding this to be hard to follow, normally I'd say it's best to play the game yourself to get a handle on how they work, but...

At the end of the dungeon, you reach a simulacrum of the Nexus. Yet one thing stands in our heroes' way, an evil god, who's conceptually not too dissimilar to MARDEK's princess-abducting dragon (he even wears a mask shaped like a dragon's head), except with an actual speaking role. However, when you confront it, you'll find that he's not the complete pushover that the dragon was, instead making sure that you've got a handle on this game's mechanics. All of its sentimancy operates on the Vivacity rune, and can tilt your party's towards being Grave so that your Jolly sentimancy will be less effective. After a while, he'll start charging up for a big attack, so you need to drive down your excitement all the way when that happens.

I wonder how many players quit before this point.

With the evil god pacified, he offers the adventurers a wish. Mardek has no problem with his; he asks the god for puppies and chocolate. Enki, on the other hand, is a lot more concerned; he has no idea exactly what his deepest wish is. Anyways, playtime's over, and the boys go back home for the night. Once again, Mardek's mom tells him about how much she misses his father.

Enki is a Mhandisi, and so, the most noticeble difference between him and his MARDEK incarnation is that, aside from being no longer plagued by that game's sameface problem, is that he is black. Furthermore, his home petal, Mji Mkuu, is basically Wakanda. In contrast, the rest of the Bronze Archipelagon, including the island of Belfan, where this game is set, is populated by Bold, lion-people basically.

So this game's backstory involves a black man who abandons his white different-race wife and their kid. Oh dear.

That night, Mardek dreams about the god granting him a wish to have chocolate puppies for hands or something, when suddenly, a being dressed entirely in white appears and says something cryptic. So ends the chapter.

Episode 2

Episode two, "The Fallen God", picks up exactly where chapter one ended, which corresponds to about halfway through chapter one of MARDEK. Mardek is suddenly woken up by Deugan, who tells him that something fell from the sky into the nearby forest. Since Deugan kept going on about his dream last episode, he thinks that a god has landed in the woods, and that it could fulfill his dream to be brave. Yes, that's the reason he was LARPing as Enki before.

Right when they leave Mardek's house, they see a young boy making a run for the village's exit, followed closely by a bespectacled inventor. The boy is Steele, who you might remember from MARDEK, and the inventor is Meraeadyth, who is, as you might have guessed from her name, a gender-swapped version of MARDEK's stuttering inventor.

The boys run into her and Mardek tries to make friends with her, but she's not interested at all. She'd much rather chase the boy into the woods on her own. I guess she doesn't even have a fetch quest for us either.

Cornwall's playthrough video takes the time to talk with every single NPC in town before leaving. There's this one NPC named Cryre who's depressed because he's 28, has done nothing with his life so far, and doesn't have a girlfriend. Hmmm, how old was Cornwall when he made this game? More importantly, not only is Mardek's dad missing, but Deugan's mother is dead as well. You can find their surviving parents working close together. Very closely.

To advance the plot, you have to go to Meraeadyth's house on the east side of town, where she's having a heated discussion with her father, Berdanre. Now that I typed his name out for the first time, something about the way it's spelled just seems wrong. He walks with a cane, and has only one arm, and every single word that comes out of his mouth is sarcasm, so he's confined to his daughter's care, especially since his wife died from an accident brought about by his mentor. It is that same woman, in fact, whose necklace, the only thing they have left of her, was stolen by the boy.

Upon entering the forest, they meet Meraeadyth again, blocking the way further in. She has her own method of dealing with the omnipresent miasma and the creatures born from it: a mechanical remote-controlled dog that follows her everywhere. In the meantime, she herself suppresses her own emotions and embraces reason in order to minimize the danger that the monsters pose. But didn't no one tell her that bottling up your emotions is a bad idea?

"Dying is what it prevents" she says. So that means that this is a world where people can be literally killed by their own inner turmoil.

Anyways, it's time to find that god. Sure, there's a witch who's rumored to live in these woods, but I'm sure she wouldn't mind us being here.

This area serves as your introduction to how the game handles enemy encounters, a mechanic that takes advantage of the fact that the game was developed for devices with touch screens. At regular intervals, shadowy vortexes will start rising from the bottom of the screen. If they reach the top, you get an encounter.

And the anxieties of those who visit the forest are molded by the miasma into the form of adorable woodland creatures, which were mostly borrowed from MARDEK and Miasmon. We have a mushroom creature, a bunny, a coconut, and a fish.

Like in MARDEK, or really any RPG with dungeons, the Slumberwood is dotted with treasure chests. In fact, there's one within sight of where you enter. However, when you open them, what you get is a...line of poetry? I can only imagine how alienating this is to players expecting more MARDEK. Even if they managed to tolerate the overcomplicated rune system and non-violent theming, getting poetry instead of, well, actual treasure in a treasure chest could have been the last straw for them.

Further in, the party meets Steele, with the necklace that he stole from Meraeadyth. Deugan, desiring to be brave, runs after him, only to be thrown off of the bridge they're standing on and into the river below, while Steele disappears deeper into the forest, eager to meet the fallen god.

Fortunately, Deugan is just down the river, being helped by an old woman. This is Sylvia, the witch mentioned earlier. She hand him a talisman to relieve his stress.

This may seem like an empty gesture, but in this world, magic can be cast using objects with sentimental value to the holder, so Sylvia's gift will certainly prove useful to him.

And not a moment too soon, because when the party tries to cross the bridge again, a shark made of Deugan's anxiety materializes before the party.

Like with the last boss, this shows that, true to the nature of the game, bosses will serve more as puzzles than shows of brute force. The talisman Deugan just received gives him the skill Calm, which lowers his excitement. If you can keep him calm, the creature will eventually be tamed on its own accord.

JRPGs are no stranger to filler boss fights, that serve no purpose plot-wise but to maintain the gameplay pacing, so it's nice that each boss fight in this game serves to be the literal embodiments of the characters' inner conflicts.

But wait, we're not done just yet. Up ahead is the crystal, that Steele is trying to punch in order to get the god's attention. I guess his placement here means that the game is consolidating his namesake's role with that of Mugbert, the actual boss of chapter 1 of MARDEK.

The ingenuous as usual MARDEK tries to make friends with him as well, and you can easily guess how that goes. So Deugan tries to attack him with his miasmon, evidently having forgotten that this is not a conventional RPG, until Sylvia steps in and carries Steele away.

Mardek reaches out and touches the crystal, and finds himself transported to a starry realm, in front of a being identifying himself as Rohoph. He explains that the world of Alora Fane is slowly dying in the absence of its gods, so he has arrived to save it, and that Mardek is just what he needed to carry out his mission.

Mardek's possession elicits very different reactions from Deugan and Meraeadyth.

Meraeadyth: If you're a real god, show me a miracle. Right now.

Rohoph: Alas, I cannot, for no one here believes in me.

Deugan: If you're a god, that means you can grant my wish! I wish I was a warrior, instead of a worrier.

Rohoph: Why dost thou wish to hurt other people? Art thou some manner of sinner?

On the way out of the woods, Steele is there, being confronted by Sylvia. It seems like every time he's on screen, the writing suddenly turns into something out of a Care Bears episode:

Sylvia: Please stop stealing from other kids.

Steele: Screw you, you old hag, there's nothing wrong with me!

And what wisdom does the newly incarnated god have to share with these mere mortals regarding this turn of events?

Thou who art not good art and bringest no good.

In other words, those who aren't good...aren't good. Such are the words of the divine.

But hey, at least we have the necklace back!

It's been a while since anyone has seen the boys, so back at the entrance, the party meets up with someone named Collie, who on top of being a lion-esque Bold, also seems to be some sort of dog person. She is a cherub, who is sort of equivalent to MARDEK's royal guards. They're basically the lands royal errand-boys, and with enough training, they can become seraphim, who are even better errand boys, and they all get to live in a castle ruled by King Yahve. Yes, there's kind of a theme going on here.

That night, Rohoph tells Mardek that his goal is to gather the faith of the people of Belfan, and only then "the reins of this world shall be [his]." Not sinister at all!

In the void surrounding Alora Fane, there are five beings similar to Rohoph. They are the Atonae, the game's equivalent to the alien government that Rohoph was part of in the original game. One of them rambles about art, one of them goes "Gee, I'm not sure if Rohoph should have done that," one of them carries a novelty foam finger around, one of them speaks in rhyme, and one of them speaks in cryptic, unsetlling rhyme. They seem to be taking an interest in whatever Rohoph has planned...

Episode 3

Episode three, "Longing for Belonging," didn't seem to correspond to any part of MARDEK.

It was also the very first time that Cornwall has charged money for his content. But even its modest price of around 3 dollars apparently proved to be too much for most of his fanbase, which I suppose would include those bleating "Where's Mardek 4?" at him on his old site's forums.

This episode was as long as the first two put together, and is so text-heavy that I wonder if Cornwall ever considered making it a visual novel instead.

As mentioned before, Cornwall hasn't recorded footage of this episode. Even though I myself could get the game working with Bluestacks, the third episode still remains locked. Fortunately, someone did manage to record the whole game, episode 3 included, and upload it in a playlist which can be viewed here. (Episode 3 starts with part 6)

The episode begins by introducing Emeela, who is, obviously, this game's counterpart to Emela. She is a Meek, a deer-person. So we have lions who are bold and deer who are meek, I wonder how long it took Cornwall to come up with that. She is really, really lonely, and in fact, I'll get it out of the way right now--she's a stand-in for Cornwall. Her opening dialogue about how she wants to find her soulmate instead of being holed up in her room all the time is, in fact, inspired by Cornwall's own social struggles.

To make a long cutscene short, she's asked by her mom to go out and pick up groceries. Normally her father would do it, but he's suicidally depressed, along with everyone in wherever this place is. But since everyone on the island of Belfan seems to be really, really racist towards Meek, she'll have to wear a hood to go out.

So just like in MARDEK, Emeela lives at the bottom of a lake. And she's not an elemental guardian this time, so I'm not sure what the purpose of an underwater Meek settlement is.

It's Elwyen. And not only does she have brown hair, but she has an actual personality that isn't mooning after the main character. It's being mad at her parents and wanting to live in the lake with the mermaids that she was told lived there, with a touch of racism towards the Meek.

So when Emeela pops out, she gets stars in her eyes and immediately tries to bond with her. Unfortunately, she believes that the two would get along like fire and water. No really, Elwyen's Courage-sentimental, whose symbol is fire, while Emeela is of the Sorrow sentiment, whose symbol is a teardrop. Subtlety!

Her grocery run was supposed to take her to the town of Wyrmourn, to the east, the counterpart to MARDEK's Canonia, but Emeela, embarrassed by her encounter, decides to go to the west instead. There you have a ruined temple, certainly a far cry from the nondescript plains from MARDEK.

There she comes across a familiar (to the player) sight--Deugan and Sylvia sitting in a clearing and meditating. They immediately notice Emeela, and Deugan, immediately seizing an opportunity to be brave, introduces himself to her as a great and mighty hero! One who will gladly aid this fair maiden by escorting her to the storage room in his hometown of Gemsand, because here in the Socialist Republic of Belfan, food is free to all who needs it.

In the storage room, Deugan and Emeela talk about stuff like huge melons and bags full of seeds. It's comforting to know that despite his spiritual awakening, he hasn't lost his fondness for innuendo.

After this conversation ends, we meet two more familiar faces. Mardek's gotten taller, and now wears an adorable puppy shirt. Meanwhile, Meraeadyth is now a cherub, albeit one that doesn't get along with the others. Her assignment: go to the temple where Emeela and Deugan just were and gain some info on the gods from there. How long has it been since they disappeared again?

Remember the necklace that Steele stole last episode? You can pick it up if you go back to Meraeadyth's house. It was established last episode that

Off to the temple again. The gang meets up with Sylvia once more, and she tells them that she is aware of the gods' absence, due to their evident failure to answer the desperate prayers of their devotees. It is then that the game introduces us one of the more...idiosyncratic parts of Cornwall's new philosophy.

According to Sylvia, the devotees were absorbed in what she calls the False Ideal of Longing. This setting has three False Ideals, Longing, Identity, and Judgment. They are accompanied by their respective True Ideals of Presence, Silence, and Acceptance. Some of you old-school RPG fans might be reminded of Ultima IV and its eight virtues based on the three principles of truth, love, and courage.

Up ahead, they find what appears to be a petrified crystal atop a pillar. Emeela explains that it is one of the Mementos of the Aolmna, one of the relics forged by Alora Fane's original gods that the world itself was formed from. What's it doing out in the open, and how it got to such a pathetic state, is beyond me.

In the very depths of the temple complex, there is a small, humble cottage. Inside is Ola, a blind, bedridden old man, and the last remaining devotee of the gods. You really think that Sylvia would have done something about him, despite their differences in belief.

Rohoph attempts to use his divine might to heal him, but, having inhabited the body of a young boy for the past few years, combined with Ola's waning faith has rendered his powers less than effective.

Yet, moved by his suffering, the party professes their faith in him, giving Rohoph the power to administer Canadian healthcare.

We then cut to the afterlife, which looks exactly like the woods from episode 2.

Ola: Is this the afterlife? Where are the other gods?

Rohoph: They are gone, and thou hast no more need of them. I shall be your one true god.

It seems that watching the old man get euthanized has gotten to her. She starts breaking down in front of the party, ranting about how futile emotions are and how she herself is unfit for her position. You see Merry, you should have known that bottling your emotions is dangerous.

Especially when they can spawn a giant abstract bird to attack you while the best song in the whole game plays.

This boss is a bit more "traditional" than episode 2's boss, yet is consequentially a bit harder. It starts off spamming an AoE attack that uses the Abstract rune. Emeela is herself Abstract, and has a skill called Difference, which changes the target's runes to the opposite of the caster--this is key to shutting down its onslaught. From there, building its rapport is a pretty simple matter; just be careful not to let its excitement reach maximum.

The team returns to Gemsand, Merry quits the cherubim, Mardek, Deugan, and Emeela consider becoming cherubim themselves, and Emeela returns to her home in the sanctuary underneath Lake Lacrimosa, narrowly missing a still pissed off Elwyen on the way.

We meet the Atonae once again, and they're quite impressed at Rohoph going Go-Go-Gadget Euthanasia on an old man. But it seems that they also share his concern about the deteriorating state of Alora Fane. Morric, the Creation-sentiment member of this group, offers to descend into the realm, seeing it as a work of art that must be preserved.

And so the episode ends, with Emeela being transported to some sort of waiting room between episodes, with an NPC telling the player to please look forward to the next episode that will never, ever come.

And that was Taming Dreams.

At the time I found out about this game, I had almost completely forgotten about that silly Flash RPG that I played in high school, and since Cornwall presented this game on his blog as a more refined version of that game, I was willing to overlook the fact that MARDEK would never be finished and give this game a chance. And boy, did I end up enjoying it more than expected. I even tried to speedrun all three of the available episodes (my record is 22 minutes, by the way)

It's a shame that the game didn't earn much of a following. I can easily see Emeela's issues in particular resonating with a not-insignificant portion of Twitter and Tumblr's userbases.

As unfinished as the game is, it's an interesting proof of concept, but I understand why players, particularly fans of MARDEK, would be alienated by it. On the gameplay side of things, all that stuff with runes, excitement, and sentiments would be a bit too much for the standard RPG player used to concrete numerical stats, even though I personally had little trouble making sense of them.

Meanwhile, while MARDEK had a surprisingly involved story for what would initially be seen as a silly browser game, it was still as irreverent as you would expect from Flash developers of the time. This game, on the other hand, while far from devoid of levity, leans harder into its attempt at an emotional story. While I appreciate the effort to give MARDEK's characters more nuanced personalites, much of the game thus far, particularly its third episode seems to consist of its characters rambling on and on and on, so much that the actual gameplay starts to feel like a formality.

Then you have the issue of Rohoph. In MARDEK, his goal was very self-serving, even if it didn't seem so at first: he wanted to be rid of his former comrades, and used the main character as a tool in order to achieve that end. Here, while he does seem to have a more altruistic goal, to save Alora Fane from dying, he manner in which he aims to do so is sinister indeed. He goes on and on about the importance of peace and putting an end to suffering, and even tells Mardek that he plans to take control of the world once they've gathered enough faith. And, depending on how faithful Cornwall planned on making the game to its precursor, he might end up trying to gain control of the artifacts which forged the world itself in his bid for supremacy.

Cornwall is one of the last people that I would have expected to succumb to the siren song of Games as a Service. His plan for this game going forward was for it to have more than a dozen chapters, with each chapter past the second costing a modest price. Unfortunately, not only did the game evidently prove to be as overambitious as its precursor, resulting in Cornwall abandoning the project, but it is no longer available for download on the Google Play Store. What pushes this into GaaS territory, however, is the method the game uses to save progress. Cornwall made use of a cloud storage system called Flox to handle players' save data. However, that service went down in 2020, erasing any save data for this game, and making it impossible to creature any more save data. This could be his most short-sighted decision with regards to this game.

Still, this game shows just how much Cornwall has grown as a game developer. Even though this game will never be finished, it shows a great amount of polish, more than any of his games up to this point. Too bad it might not have been what the public is asking for.

I would also like to note that it is the one mobile game that I was willing to revisit that isn't a port of a console or PC game.