[polytely]

>Everything is extremely based on reality

Very much disagree on that one.

SPOILER WARNING:

There are enough weird things in there, it's possible to miss them, but discovering really changes your whole outlook on the world. Things like: the Pale, the Insulindian Phasmid & the Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy in the shipping container.

Some skills are also kinda magical if you invest enough points, Interfacing & Inland Empire could be explained by your imagination, but it's hard to argue that Esprit De Corps (cutaway to what is happening to Precinct 41) & Shivers (Have conversations with the city of Revachol itself) aren't a bit supernatural.

[gorgoiler]

The game is like an episode of Breaking Bad set in New Crobuzon.

The concept of the Pale is utterly horrifying. It pretty much has no involvement with the game at all and I think that’s a brilliant thing.

The concept is there, lurking in the background of various plot lines, but it’s never actually part of a mission. You are left to your own imagination as to, at first, how seemingly horrific it is.

To later learn that the pale is expanding — at an unknown rate you are led to believe is like a rising tide — and will eventually destroy the world and no one really seems to care or talk about it as an issue that much puts all the other noir detective and soap opera plots and subplots in a fascinating light. The citizens of Revechol are a little insane, we get to guess a bit about why and can also deduce they are in denial.

Someone on gamepedia has pieced together this description from expository dialogue in the game:

What does the pale look like? It's acromatic, odourless, featureless. The pale is the enemy of matter and life. It is not like any other — or any thing in the world. It is the transition state of being into nothingness. Where matter borders the pale, the resulting border is an uproar of matter, rising into the pale. Rolling. Evaporating even, a great vision. The area of transition between the world and the pale is called porch collapse: A grey coronal mist, cold vapour, marked by spores of an opportunistic microorganism.

Pale is difficult to describe and measure, as it's something whose fundamental property is the suspension of properties: physical, epistemological, linguistic. The further into pale you travel, the steeper the degree of suspension. Right down to the mathematical — numbers stop working. No one has yet passed the number barrier since the discovery of the pale and it may be impossible.

In fact, one of the few measurable effects of the pale is that it is expanding at an unknown rate.

[polytely]

Totally agree, discovering what the Pale was, had a real impact on me that I don't think any other piece of fiction has ever had on me, it's like a sinking feeling, like: ow, oh no, this is what the world is?!

It's very cool in a fiction sense, but also mechanically in the game, you start as someone who has lost all their memories, which sets the character on the same knowledge level as the player, and you slowly uncover how the world works through playing. It's close enough to earth that things slowly begin to make sense, and you get lulled into a false sense of familiarity. Just as you think you have a handle on reality, the rug gets pulled away from underneath you and you fall into the Pale, a total break with anything familiar. It recontextualizes everything.

There is a line where either Joyce or Soona tells you about inter-isolary travel where she explains you that you need to aim your path through the Pale really carefully because it's possible to miss your destination and just continue sailing through the Pale forever. Which is supremely horrifying to me.

[glogla]

Reminds me of Outside from Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine - also a nontraditional post-apocalyptic RPG, but a tabletop one.

[pvaldes]

It seems that both the author of Neverending story and of this game had been exposed to experience Alzheimer in their beloved ones... great children book, but with a lot of dark undertones.

[maest]

I mostly agree, with one caveat: The Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy is partially an easter egg and, iirc, doesn't really affect the world in any way. At most, it's a commentary on wealth inequality.

The Phasmid and the Pale are fairly core to the world and story, though.