30:03 Here I mention a video about visualizing song structure with the Periodic Table - I made that video! It's called "The Shape of Songs - Visualizing Song Structure"; link in description.
I think this game is secretly about how really freaking cool it is to walk around concrete megastructures : ) However, I think the trauma/birth theory has some merit.
This is EXACTLY why every now and again, I search "NaissanceE" on UA-cam with the time of publishing set to "this month". Great work! I'm a fairly recent fan of this game, learning about it around a year ago from Jacob Geller's video, but I can tell I won't be able get it out of my head for a long time. My personal theory leans heavier towards "it's just Blame! again / it's a rogue A.I.", most likely because I've always been invested in the existential questions tied to technological progress; "is civilization just an elaborate charade with no purpose other than perpetuating itself?" and all that nonsense. I also struggle with interpreting imagery non-literally, so seeing a game full of large structures, I just assumed it's some kind of reflection on the human desire to create things. The title, "NaissanceE", didn't register to me as literal birth, but rather as "creation". "The birth of an idea", that sort of thing. In the end, it's a very surface level reading, but it's the one that has stuck with me. My "Environmental Influence" is probably the occasional nihilism I experience. Plus, general feelings of anxiety about the direction the world is heading and the value of my "work" as something long-lasting and meaningful. After I die, will anything I made be remembered? Even if it is, then for how long? Will it even matter, given that humanity will inevitably go extinct, everything left behind becoming a relic with no purpose? I find it difficult to see the game in a different light, which is probably not the best quality to have as a critic. On the other hand, my clinging to a literal reading may have something to do with my reservations towards highly abstract interpretations of art (most of which you outlined in the "Theory critique" section). To me, it just seems like a series of strange, counter-intuitive associations, where every detail is one mental stretch away from being a representation of something vague and subjective. "This part of the game is a metaphor for the human subconscious, and the floorplan of this area kinda looks like a digestive tract, and it has five levels so maybe the five stages of grief?" etc. etc... I'm not discounting these kinds of readings entirely, they're meaningful and can often be illuminating, but it's easy to fall into the trap of simply choosing to see imagery that matches the theory you're working towards. Not every vertical tube / column has to be a phallus, and sometimes, a symmetrical structure with two focal points and an exit is just there to look nice. Literal readings are also susceptible to this bias, of course, but at least they have to contend with concrete elements of the world which are harder to deny or dismiss with a simple change of associations. Oof, sorry for the rambling rant. Great video. Always lovely to see more people talking about this beautiful game!
I prefer the science fiction approach. If we assume that the events of the game happened in its canon, then we have to assume that the world was made by people. This is because there are human like structures in this world, a bar, a prison, apartments (that are furnished and still have power going to them), even a strip club. My theory is that the Host is a being made to host humanity, it constructed the entire super structure that you see in the game, all with the purpose (initially) to house people and make sure their existence is kept. I believe that at some point the Host realized that keeping humanity alive was pointless or even completely detrimental to some end. Thus it had the entire race killed and continued building without people in mind. All purpose, not a single restriction put on them like safety or stuff that squishy humans need. Lucy is the last human alive, and she cannot escape her fate. Lucy was the name given to the first human being. It would be fitting if Lucy was the name of the first and last human. Or perhaps she is still the first. Of maybe another race, another kind of man.
So, I have been thinking on your metaphor of lights in the first chapter being metaphor of friends trying to help and yet some of them feel like they are messing with you. In my opinion it's not exactly that these friends are "messing with" Lucy on purpose- to not get in detail, I had some trauma of my own and fight with depression and paranoia and I have friends who tried to help but I several times felt like they are not helping at all and are trying to make things worse. I know they tried to help but in a downed moment it really felt like there was some contept behind them trying. And that leads me to the belief that in metaphor you view NeissancE as this would be a metaphor of Lucy maybe blaming her friends for not helping at all even when they in reality are trying as best as they can.
I like how you explained the pregnancy interpretation. As far I as recall from the steam thread, most of the interpretations that suggest the game is a metaphor for pregnancy just refer the to the title and call it a day. That never resonated with me because I'd haves question like how does the dessert fit your metaphor, or how a city mega structure, or what Lucy being lost has to do with a metaphor for pregnancy. I appreciate that you went into detail to explain your interpretation vs the several other that just say “Naissance is french for birth” and don't go any deeper into the interpretation.
I mean, it's definitely a very interesting reading of the game, and I'd like to do a run through of the game with that theory in mind. I played NaissanceE for the first time after watching the Jacob Geller video and was mostly just marveling at the insane infinite architecture of the game.
Its such a shame this game is so obscure. I would love to hear more interpretations on the game from others, so Ill share mine. Im not very interested myself in the game's story, its not a game where I want to find out the plot and lore of its world. Im more interested in what the game represents. While playing it, its really hard to pin-point the games meaning due to its vague nature, but you can clearly feel something so deep and meaningful coming from the game, and thats what I think its about. The game is meant to create these feelings, ones that are so complex, its very hard to meaningfully explain through words, but when one experiences them, they are feelings everyone resonates with. I personally felt an overwhelming feeling of loneliness, alienation and being lost in a world thats so human in nature, but completelly unwelcoming to any real person. In a way its a warning, a warning for us to not create a world meant for ourselves, but in reality completelly cold and lonely. I hope someone finds this comment and enjoys my interpretation :)
I just played the game (even though it was on my backlog for 8 years). My interpretation was literal (similar to the steam description). It felt like it started as a love letter to Blame + having fun with liminal themes/mechanics, while also playing with vague ideas of cooperating with (and then resisting) a higher power to add spectacle. I only hated the flashing areas. My bias for that perspective is big: I'm doing similar stuff on a gmod backrooms map and I have a list of cool mechanics/themes/spectacles for the player. I have "story" hints that allow player-interpretation, but I wish I had a semi-deep story since that would give it more weight; that's just mad hard with my existing disjointed areas. In contrast, I'm sure the NaissanceE dev was only interested in player-interpretation during dev since that was more unique at the time and closer to Blame.
Pretty clever to put multiple "sensitive content" warnings in the front so you dont spoil anything. Good video, Im gonna check ya channel out. Hope the algoryth picks you up!
this is a really excellent video!! i dont have too much to add in particular since ive never played NaissanceE myself; i lack the time/energy to put into most games today. but your video really showed what a work of art NaissanceE is, and i think thats a testament to both your own storytelling-narration and the ability of this game to act as a medium! like you point out at the end, you connected what you saw in the gamewith experiences you were processing at the time - not ones you were directly part of, but certainly ones you were around and thinking a lot about. i think its here that a game like NaissanceE shows its real power - through such textural landscapes ripe for symbolism, its easy to read in an emotional story that _you_ connect with. perhaps it doesnt hold together in any absolute manner if you treat it as though there is an objective story to be found... but like you were getting at, that isnt really the point of the game :) in a way instead, it acts as a reflection, or maybe a labyrinth of mirrors: you see yourself and your own experiences within it (or those of others around you), and though it wont always form logical, consistent projections, it still offers you the opportunity to see yourself and your emotions from a different perspective. like wobbly or recursive mirrors do! ;D - but seriously, thank you for sharing your thoughts through this excellently crafted video. theres a lot to think about and i hope my own comment might share another view at the game inspired by your own :) PS: i was also inspired here by my recent first experience playing through celeste! i wont spoil it in case you havent played (and if not-- its absolutely a recommend, hehe), but id still like to add: while there are more particular themes with clearer intent, and the protagonist has a more distinct narrative/personal existence than, say, lucy of NaissanceE does, the game still regularly provides ways for you, the player, to reflect on your own feelings and experiences. so if youre the sort who connects with the protagonists experiences, or are close to someone who does, youll probably find much to learn and bond with through the game - especially through its more environmental/gameplay-based storytelling, often in ways i felt could be similar to the experience of a game like NaissanceE. :3
I love the "Here are a bunch of trigger warning that MIGHT be in the video, but I can't tell you which ones." Pretty sure there aren't any racial slurs in the game with zero dialog or text.
For me the game felt like a response to the question "If God made all of this beautiful nature, and everything we are, how could you reject him?" The game feels like walking through all of the creations of this deity and witnessing the lonely beauty of it all. You are the last one to see the makings of this entity, and it wants you to understand you should be a part of it. One comment I saw was talking about the desert in response to this theory, and I think in regards to this one it shows how the host views your stubborn individualism. It shows how a society tried to act on its own and decayed to sand and dust. There's more to be seen, but this is what comes to mind. I really like the trauma / pregnancy theory in conjunction with what I already thought of the game. Implementing all three at once I think leads to interesting results.
Woaw ! Finally a video like I always wanted talking about NaissanceE. First thing : congrats and thank you, this approach is really complementary of an intimate experience of this game, you did great in pushing that far the reflexion. Then, i gotta say i was super happy of how you integrated the whole "giving birth" theory, that was kinda my most important axis of reading, not able to share it with anyone for real. I mean that this interpretation was the most "concrete" i found so far, mostly based on the game's name and the end message obviously, but also the host, the fact she's called Lucy, etc. To be fair, and you've shown in pretty well in your auto-critic (which is lovely, congrats for just doing that !)... the rape thing might be a personnal addition to the raw structure of the game. Giving birth can represent a "trauma" in itself and the highly minimalistic structure of NaissanceE can totally absorb any variation of that basic thing : conception. And I think it's not hard to see how NaissanceE seems to make that relation between human conception and... art creation. That's a theme we can find pretty often in art and, personnally, NaissanceE moved me a lot in that sense. Sometimes it feels we're playing a game that is not totally "born" yet, we're not welcome, we're in the tortured mind of LimasseFive who's trying to "give birth" to his artistic project. These interpratations are maybe less "solid" and maybe more abstract, philosophical, which am more attached to. But again : any interpratation is valid since NaissanceE doesn't seem to need any concrete reasons to exist. And that leads me to this very joyful thought : it's wonderful how we can transcript the obscure and mysterious expressiion of NaissanceE, but it will always remain to... darkness and abstraction. I don't think the game can be understood through a "normal" analysis procress, consisting in translating each element of the game design or level design into a clear and understandable message. Experiencing it through the senses, through that ambiance and constant feeling of sollitude and despair, feels more relevant than any word could ever be. That being said, it's not devaluating at all the exercice you went through, on the contrary. Like a Fumito Ueda game (ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian), NaissanceE can be anything in the players mind, because it's a gift made to us, like a box we can fill with our own individual experiences. It was born at the release of the game, and has been free to grow up in our minds, in any possible way. It does feel very intense for the creator Limasse Five, and i'll never thank him and the fans enough for giving a chance to that masterpiece. A true, everlasting, piece of modern art, deeply intimate and human, like almost no other game made me feel (i'd just mention ICO again, and certainly FEZ, being such a personnal expression of his creator Phil Fish). Hopefully my words were clear enough (not sure, haha) but in the end it doesn't matter : NaissanceE will remain this uncatchable dream, or nightmare, that speaks to us the most in silence and pure immersion. This is when video game is at its best, expressing things in a way ONLY this media can do it. It's acually why i play video games :D Thanks again !
I've always liked the idea that more than one interpretation is considered valid by the artist. He did name it birth, but he did pull inspiration from Blame! and I think it's more than healthy to purposefully look at a piece of art through different lenses. I do really like your interpretation with or without it's flaws and its now something I'll bring with me when I replay NaissanceE along with interpretations from others sources like Jacob Geller's isolation, or my personal love of brutalist architecture which for some is a reaction against the modern age of architecture, or for me that I just love that it brings something primal and reactionary out of me because it's so different from normal. I think here ambiguity is the name of the game, and like an empty room it let's us fill it with our own ideas, and sometimes we just need to try something to see if we can get the piano through the door or be content with the cello someone else left in the corner.
Thanks for critiquing your own theory, especially critiquing the process of interpreting something too liberally (which I myself shall do shortly). Very nice to have it presented as "hey, what if you look at it in this context/from this perspective" instead of "i discovered THE TRUTH" :D SPOILERS (naturally) My own experience/theory (valid for no one but myself) though it's been years since I played it. I took the game's introduction to mean birth, and of course "the pussy gate" fits that. The game deals in both abstract and very concrete imagery, and presents it on a spectrum between fascination and reverence to horror and nausea. Almost everything in the entire game is greyish, commonly associate with depression. (However, you can just as easily attribute that to the game being made by one person, and he just did what he could without a graphical artist). As the game progresses though, the experience of isolation becomes gradually more oppressive, driving the protagonist insane, and ultimately to suicide; the jump off the cliff. Note that the scene before the jump is a desert, commonly associated with lack of life, which can be taken as a representation of how the protagonist ends up seeing the world by the end, but it's also if memory serves the place of the most vibrant scene in the whole game. When that scene ends and the isolation returns, the protagonist jumps, which is... I think ... one of the few, if not the only meaningful interactions the player can have with the world. The game is almost entirely comprised of observation and moving, but not interacting. To me, that lack of interaction over time reinforces the feeling of alienation, of being out of place because you cannot interact with the world in any meaningful way. A few loose observations: - Lucy is a nickname for LSD (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds). - If you take a look at the author's twitter, there's a lot of talk about astral planes and meditation and general metaphysical stuff. Samsara - the cycle of birth and rebirth in eastern religions that deal with meditation - in my opinion connects well thematically well with the game introducing you to the chapter of "The Beginning" at the end. - The sound that plays as you jump is the same as in the beginning of the game, which suggests a connection between the beginning and the end of the game. - In the the desert feel-good scene, the light and dark moving "things" form a double helix (genetics/birth?) and the music evokes a sense of wonder and gratitude? - After the jump, you fall through cogworks which may symbolize the protagonist experiencing the realization of the nature of reality. - The final scene is unquestionably laden with horror, which could be a metaphore for the horror of realizing the cycle rebirth never ends - Has anybody commented on that the absolutely first thing you see after the introduction is a broken slab? Why is it broken? To me, that suggests something is not as it should be right from the start. It seems kind of... unnecessary if it was just a visual cue to suggest it broke from the protagonists fall. I do wonder if the author has either attemped suicide before himself, or if someone close to him has. Alright... Private John Ramble out.
I've since taken a look at Limasse Five's Twitter, since I heard that apparently another project is/was in the works. There's definitely a lot to explore there; they were quite the prolific tweet-er at one point. Interesting to think how much of their inner thoughts like those seen on their Twitter sub/consciously made their way into the game.
NaissanceE has cheats built-in to the Unreal game engine that I activated to be able to freely float around and whatnot. You can get a lot of mileage out of them and explore places that were never meant to be reached :)
@@jatsko3113yeah, press ` (top left of keyboard, below ESCAPE) to open console. to noclip, type ghost. to walk, type walk. to fly, type fly. to not die, type god (type again to disable) i like to look at the behind the scenes using these
No, you're no the only biggest fan of this game, I am too, this game is just one of the most unic games to ever exist, different from everything, its almost not a game but rather a experience, its like a modern abstract painting but good, it doesn't tell a proper direct story, it doesn't have a direct objective, you don't have a reason to be there, yet you are, so all you can do is explore this place, even when its so frightening. The other mechanics aren't there to represent "a reason" to do things, they're there to fill some holes, because you're a human, when you run, you have to breath, if you fall from a high place you hurt yourself, we know the game has a protagonist, but you're just in her placa, like most games, you're inside someones head, having this experience, this absurd and abstract experience. I could talk about this game for hours, but for now, I just want to say that your interpretation misses something quite important, you said you don't stick with this theory anymore, but I think you still hasn't thought about this specific thing, that the real protagonist of this game isn't Lucy, but the structure, it's quite interesting to revisit the game with this in mind, and great video.
This is really nuanced interpretation that I really like & I posit this: (Content Warning: sexual assault, racism, transphobia & other bigotries that intersect with sexual assault) being the victim of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, is filled with a lot of conflicting oobelygoobely brain stuff. IE, contradicting influences I have no control over are pressuring me from the outside (like friends, family, or society) while equally contradicting & uncontrollable forces act on me from the inside (the messy conflicting confusing emotional & intellectual fallout. Now combining your interpretation with Jacob's interpretation about alienation; that lends more credibility. Honestly, the more I think about, the more your "critiques" support your theory. I'll support this statement by adding another spice to the bowl: gender. Once you add gender into all the above considerations, it just fits that much more & the more filter you put on it the more it works. Think of all the above from the perspective of a cis, white, female rape survivor. Ok, now do it all again but this time you're a cis white male sexual assault survivor & now the gauntlet has fundamentally changed because of how society treat these 2 victims very differently. Now keep doing this over & over with different gendered & racial readings. Let's muddy the water even more by changing the trauma just slightly: sexual assault that isn't capital R Rape For Various Reasons. Like, the more I apply all the different lenses I've learned about & experienced in relation to sexual assault in general, my own experience of it, & how society treats it, the more this treatment fits. This is the reading I feel will stay with me the most as I experience this game for the first time & I'm really exited for this philosophical exercise lol. Damn I'm so stoked for this I'm gonna have to put this queue on hold while I go play it.
@@jatsko3113 I thought you handled the topic very well honestly! Straight to the point, no frills, but also respectful. This was a great video & I'm looking forward to more!
It's funny seeing this again because the original video was one of the reasons I started reading BLAME! and I've since become a massive fan of it without playing this game. I might get around to it eventually but I guess I just haven't. ig I just like the environments more than anything else and seeing footage/speedruns/etc is more than enough to sate that.
Interesting and quite mostly metaphorical take on this game. In meta sence you can definetly take it as either healing from the brink or loosing yor mind and exporiancing oblivion at the end. My take on the game is more... Artistic and some may say "fanboyish", because I take playing Neissance as essentially an interactive way through BLAME (to an extent) I take it more from Gmod expiriance (of all places)- in that game I tended to download a lot of rather big, intriquite maps and some parkour mod to basically explore the place (gm_boreal is my favourite, but I am still on look for that one damn metro map). And well.... the whole "Let's walk through BLAME" attitude you can also blame (hehe) on the fact my first videoessay expiriance with the game was from Jacob Geller. Thanks to his vid I also learned about BLAME and Tsutomu Nihei (thx Jacob, the stuff associated with that series is awesome)
If this theory did have some merit, I would want to comment on how unsavory the option is for you to take the route to abort the pregnancy, thus ending the game there. For the game to warn you not to go that direction, with an almost threatening tone, and for the game to end when you reach that point comes across as really horrid. If the game was about Lucy's journey of recovery, the journey of recovering from a trauma like that doesn't end when you choose to end the pregnancy, so I feel it is incredibly unfair that the game ends there, almost as if to say you made the wrong choice and to punish you as the player for doing so. I'm not sure if that necessarily puts a hole in the argument, but if this theory does represent the message the game is trying to get across, then I really. REALLY hate that scene. I don't know anything about the author but I somehow doubt that was the message they were trying to get across.
@@jatsko3113 I've got the framerate counter on and I've not seen it drop below 60 but I've also not seen it go above 62 At times doing the platforming at the "one more effort" checkpoint (is that it's name?), it doesn't let me move anymore. Just randomly happens and I have no choice but to reload the checkpoint... It's at the part where the the music is really intense with female vocal sounds
Can't remember if I already responded to this because some of my comments went missing, but: In that section, I do know that if you don't move fast enough the increasing winds will eventually catch up to you and blow you backwards. Since your framerate sounds stable, the only advice I can really offer is to try to keep moving forward - you have to constantly run through the entire thing. If you're already doing that, then I don't know what the problem could be besides a corrupted save or something, maybe. Hope this helps!
@@jatsko3113 Yeah... I eventually got past that section by pure brute force basically Repeating it many times and getting frustrated until I got it somehow
if you are more interested in the world of NaissanceE read a manga called blame! ,you will find the answers for your questions pewdipie made a review : ua-cam.com/video/6I4HDFSOc6U/v-deo.html
Putting a bunch of random warnings at the beginning kind of completely undermines the point of content warnings. If talking about one of those things will ruin my day, but the rest are fine, how am I supposed to know if I can watch this video safely?
Also I loved this video, although I hoped for a better theory, the game is so big and surreal, and the theory seems so simple, although as said before I still loved this video great content, also have you ever made a video about Kairo?
i think theres something else to this imo the cube creature at the start is black the one found at the end is white the white one may represent that the child is male?
I just played through this game with a friend and the headcanon i came up with maybe has some spiritual similarities but it's more half-baked. I thought of our avatar as a neurodivergent person trying to grow up in a society that they don't understand. We start out falling into a "bed" upon birth but immediately must begin exploring our strange environment. At first everything seems impossible to traverse, with people who half-understand us shedding their light sometimes in the right places for us and sometimes not, because we are difficult for them to understand. We grow up not seeing people, because we can't understand them and prefer to explore the machines of society that keep everyone alive, even if they aren't made to be played with. My theory is that the world isn't actually uninhabited; it's densely inhabited, but we are simply avoiding the people, or at least the vast majority of them who are content staying in their office megastructures which we only care to look at from afar. It's like when you walk around certain neighborhoods and rarely see people because they're all much more comfortable staying inside, unlike us. Our character realizes as the game progresses what most of society chooses to ignore, which. is the fundamental weirdness of everything built by humans, and how being even just a little different from the norm can make structures that are hospitable to some seem menacing and passively antagonistic to us. The puzzles all involve moving light to be able to move forward in the game, much like how to us interacting with people in order to get what. we need or want can feel like a puzzle with arbitrary rules, for which we have no natural intuition. The cubes seem to be others like us, who find their specific places in the fringes of society avoided by most, and the light are the people who can coexist with us and understand us somewhat, but are still too comfortable in neurotypical society to want to stay with us for very long on our journey when they have their own strange purposes to attend to. After a final leap into darkness (one of many we have had to take) we eventually elevate into the desert, which is where we find our own enlightenment and learn an artform that we can fall in love with and introduce to the world. (Or perhaps we find. a non-artistic calling, or a lover, or a friend. A hyperfixation that we want to make into something healthy and lasting, and share with whoever will listen.) The "performance" and the maze in the desert were the emotional high points for me when I played, they felt like the kind of spiritual awakenings that I as a neurodivergent person have had when becoming truly passionate about something. The final terrifying step which. we know is coming is to dive back down into the world with our new gift, and to carve out our niche. "The host" is obviously "the man" to whom we must stick it. If we can avoid being battered down by the passively powerful aggression of the society we are trying finally to introduce our true selves to, which is no easy thing, then we have found a beginning and can begin a new stage of life.
30:03 Here I mention a video about visualizing song structure with the Periodic Table - I made that video! It's called "The Shape of Songs - Visualizing Song Structure"; link in description.
I think this game is secretly about how really freaking cool it is to walk around concrete megastructures : ) However, I think the trauma/birth theory has some merit.
big building good
This is EXACTLY why every now and again, I search "NaissanceE" on UA-cam with the time of publishing set to "this month". Great work!
I'm a fairly recent fan of this game, learning about it around a year ago from Jacob Geller's video, but I can tell I won't be able get it out of my head for a long time. My personal theory leans heavier towards "it's just Blame! again / it's a rogue A.I.", most likely because I've always been invested in the existential questions tied to technological progress; "is civilization just an elaborate charade with no purpose other than perpetuating itself?" and all that nonsense. I also struggle with interpreting imagery non-literally, so seeing a game full of large structures, I just assumed it's some kind of reflection on the human desire to create things. The title, "NaissanceE", didn't register to me as literal birth, but rather as "creation". "The birth of an idea", that sort of thing. In the end, it's a very surface level reading, but it's the one that has stuck with me.
My "Environmental Influence" is probably the occasional nihilism I experience. Plus, general feelings of anxiety about the direction the world is heading and the value of my "work" as something long-lasting and meaningful. After I die, will anything I made be remembered? Even if it is, then for how long? Will it even matter, given that humanity will inevitably go extinct, everything left behind becoming a relic with no purpose? I find it difficult to see the game in a different light, which is probably not the best quality to have as a critic.
On the other hand, my clinging to a literal reading may have something to do with my reservations towards highly abstract interpretations of art (most of which you outlined in the "Theory critique" section). To me, it just seems like a series of strange, counter-intuitive associations, where every detail is one mental stretch away from being a representation of something vague and subjective. "This part of the game is a metaphor for the human subconscious, and the floorplan of this area kinda looks like a digestive tract, and it has five levels so maybe the five stages of grief?" etc. etc... I'm not discounting these kinds of readings entirely, they're meaningful and can often be illuminating, but it's easy to fall into the trap of simply choosing to see imagery that matches the theory you're working towards. Not every vertical tube / column has to be a phallus, and sometimes, a symmetrical structure with two focal points and an exit is just there to look nice. Literal readings are also susceptible to this bias, of course, but at least they have to contend with concrete elements of the world which are harder to deny or dismiss with a simple change of associations.
Oof, sorry for the rambling rant. Great video. Always lovely to see more people talking about this beautiful game!
I prefer the science fiction approach.
If we assume that the events of the game happened in its canon, then we have to assume that the world was made by people. This is because there are human like structures in this world, a bar, a prison, apartments (that are furnished and still have power going to them), even a strip club.
My theory is that the Host is a being made to host humanity, it constructed the entire super structure that you see in the game, all with the purpose (initially) to house people and make sure their existence is kept.
I believe that at some point the Host realized that keeping humanity alive was pointless or even completely detrimental to some end. Thus it had the entire race killed and continued building without people in mind. All purpose, not a single restriction put on them like safety or stuff that squishy humans need.
Lucy is the last human alive, and she cannot escape her fate. Lucy was the name given to the first human being. It would be fitting if Lucy was the name of the first and last human.
Or perhaps she is still the first. Of maybe another race, another kind of man.
Its kind of reminiscent of "I have no mouth and I must scream"
considering the game was heavily inspired by Blame! you're not far from the mark.
Oh, like blame! But much more literal with a single creature that take control of everything
So, I have been thinking on your metaphor of lights in the first chapter being metaphor of friends trying to help and yet some of them feel like they are messing with you.
In my opinion it's not exactly that these friends are "messing with" Lucy on purpose- to not get in detail, I had some trauma of my own and fight with depression and paranoia and I have friends who tried to help but I several times felt like they are not helping at all and are trying to make things worse. I know they tried to help but in a downed moment it really felt like there was some contept behind them trying.
And that leads me to the belief that in metaphor you view NeissancE as this would be a metaphor of Lucy maybe blaming her friends for not helping at all even when they in reality are trying as best as they can.
I like how you explained the pregnancy interpretation. As far I as recall from the steam thread, most of the interpretations that suggest the game is a metaphor for pregnancy just refer the to the title and call it a day. That never resonated with me because I'd haves question like how does the dessert fit your metaphor, or how a city mega structure, or what Lucy being lost has to do with a metaphor for pregnancy. I appreciate that you went into detail to explain your interpretation vs the several other that just say “Naissance is french for birth” and don't go any deeper into the interpretation.
Deep thoughts and good narration.
I keep on revisiting this game again and again.
This is cool that a good quality content keeps popping up.
I mean, it's definitely a very interesting reading of the game, and I'd like to do a run through of the game with that theory in mind. I played NaissanceE for the first time after watching the Jacob Geller video and was mostly just marveling at the insane infinite architecture of the game.
I'd love to see a video about your periodic elements of song structure! That sounds really interesting
Its such a shame this game is so obscure. I would love to hear more interpretations on the game from others, so Ill share mine.
Im not very interested myself in the game's story, its not a game where I want to find out the plot and lore of its world. Im more interested in what the game represents.
While playing it, its really hard to pin-point the games meaning due to its vague nature, but you can clearly feel something so deep and meaningful coming from the game, and thats what I think its about.
The game is meant to create these feelings, ones that are so complex, its very hard to meaningfully explain through words, but when one experiences them, they are feelings everyone resonates with.
I personally felt an overwhelming feeling of loneliness, alienation and being lost in a world thats so human in nature, but completelly unwelcoming to any real person. In a way its a warning, a warning for us to not create a world meant for ourselves, but in reality completelly cold and lonely.
I hope someone finds this comment and enjoys my interpretation :)
I just played the game (even though it was on my backlog for 8 years). My interpretation was literal (similar to the steam description). It felt like it started as a love letter to Blame + having fun with liminal themes/mechanics, while also playing with vague ideas of cooperating with (and then resisting) a higher power to add spectacle. I only hated the flashing areas.
My bias for that perspective is big: I'm doing similar stuff on a gmod backrooms map and I have a list of cool mechanics/themes/spectacles for the player. I have "story" hints that allow player-interpretation, but I wish I had a semi-deep story since that would give it more weight; that's just mad hard with my existing disjointed areas. In contrast, I'm sure the NaissanceE dev was only interested in player-interpretation during dev since that was more unique at the time and closer to Blame.
Pretty clever to put multiple "sensitive content" warnings in the front so you dont spoil anything.
Good video, Im gonna check ya channel out. Hope the algoryth picks you up!
this is a really excellent video!! i dont have too much to add in particular since ive never played NaissanceE myself; i lack the time/energy to put into most games today. but your video really showed what a work of art NaissanceE is, and i think thats a testament to both your own storytelling-narration and the ability of this game to act as a medium! like you point out at the end, you connected what you saw in the gamewith experiences you were processing at the time - not ones you were directly part of, but certainly ones you were around and thinking a lot about. i think its here that a game like NaissanceE shows its real power - through such textural landscapes ripe for symbolism, its easy to read in an emotional story that _you_ connect with. perhaps it doesnt hold together in any absolute manner if you treat it as though there is an objective story to be found... but like you were getting at, that isnt really the point of the game :) in a way instead, it acts as a reflection, or maybe a labyrinth of mirrors: you see yourself and your own experiences within it (or those of others around you), and though it wont always form logical, consistent projections, it still offers you the opportunity to see yourself and your emotions from a different perspective. like wobbly or recursive mirrors do! ;D - but seriously, thank you for sharing your thoughts through this excellently crafted video. theres a lot to think about and i hope my own comment might share another view at the game inspired by your own :)
PS: i was also inspired here by my recent first experience playing through celeste! i wont spoil it in case you havent played (and if not-- its absolutely a recommend, hehe), but id still like to add: while there are more particular themes with clearer intent, and the protagonist has a more distinct narrative/personal existence than, say, lucy of NaissanceE does, the game still regularly provides ways for you, the player, to reflect on your own feelings and experiences. so if youre the sort who connects with the protagonists experiences, or are close to someone who does, youll probably find much to learn and bond with through the game - especially through its more environmental/gameplay-based storytelling, often in ways i felt could be similar to the experience of a game like NaissanceE. :3
I love the "Here are a bunch of trigger warning that MIGHT be in the video, but I can't tell you which ones." Pretty sure there aren't any racial slurs in the game with zero dialog or text.
For me the game felt like a response to the question "If God made all of this beautiful nature, and everything we are, how could you reject him?" The game feels like walking through all of the creations of this deity and witnessing the lonely beauty of it all. You are the last one to see the makings of this entity, and it wants you to understand you should be a part of it. One comment I saw was talking about the desert in response to this theory, and I think in regards to this one it shows how the host views your stubborn individualism. It shows how a society tried to act on its own and decayed to sand and dust. There's more to be seen, but this is what comes to mind.
I really like the trauma / pregnancy theory in conjunction with what I already thought of the game. Implementing all three at once I think leads to interesting results.
Holy crap this is brilliant. Maybe thats why this game effected me so greatly. Having first hand experience in that...field.
Woaw ! Finally a video like I always wanted talking about NaissanceE.
First thing : congrats and thank you, this approach is really complementary of an intimate experience of this game, you did great in pushing that far the reflexion.
Then, i gotta say i was super happy of how you integrated the whole "giving birth" theory, that was kinda my most important axis of reading, not able to share it with anyone for real. I mean that this interpretation was the most "concrete" i found so far, mostly based on the game's name and the end message obviously, but also the host, the fact she's called Lucy, etc. To be fair, and you've shown in pretty well in your auto-critic (which is lovely, congrats for just doing that !)... the rape thing might be a personnal addition to the raw structure of the game. Giving birth can represent a "trauma" in itself and the highly minimalistic structure of NaissanceE can totally absorb any variation of that basic thing : conception. And I think it's not hard to see how NaissanceE seems to make that relation between human conception and... art creation.
That's a theme we can find pretty often in art and, personnally, NaissanceE moved me a lot in that sense. Sometimes it feels we're playing a game that is not totally "born" yet, we're not welcome, we're in the tortured mind of LimasseFive who's trying to "give birth" to his artistic project. These interpratations are maybe less "solid" and maybe more abstract, philosophical, which am more attached to. But again : any interpratation is valid since NaissanceE doesn't seem to need any concrete reasons to exist.
And that leads me to this very joyful thought : it's wonderful how we can transcript the obscure and mysterious expressiion of NaissanceE, but it will always remain to... darkness and abstraction. I don't think the game can be understood through a "normal" analysis procress, consisting in translating each element of the game design or level design into a clear and understandable message. Experiencing it through the senses, through that ambiance and constant feeling of sollitude and despair, feels more relevant than any word could ever be.
That being said, it's not devaluating at all the exercice you went through, on the contrary. Like a Fumito Ueda game (ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian), NaissanceE can be anything in the players mind, because it's a gift made to us, like a box we can fill with our own individual experiences. It was born at the release of the game, and has been free to grow up in our minds, in any possible way. It does feel very intense for the creator Limasse Five, and i'll never thank him and the fans enough for giving a chance to that masterpiece. A true, everlasting, piece of modern art, deeply intimate and human, like almost no other game made me feel (i'd just mention ICO again, and certainly FEZ, being such a personnal expression of his creator Phil Fish).
Hopefully my words were clear enough (not sure, haha) but in the end it doesn't matter : NaissanceE will remain this uncatchable dream, or nightmare, that speaks to us the most in silence and pure immersion. This is when video game is at its best, expressing things in a way ONLY this media can do it. It's acually why i play video games :D
Thanks again !
nice touch with the critique section
lots of people arent willing to criticize their own theories
I can definitely see overtones of childbirth in NaissanceE. Especially given the name and the ending.
I've always liked the idea that more than one interpretation is considered valid by the artist. He did name it birth, but he did pull inspiration from Blame! and I think it's more than healthy to purposefully look at a piece of art through different lenses. I do really like your interpretation with or without it's flaws and its now something I'll bring with me when I replay NaissanceE along with interpretations from others sources like Jacob Geller's isolation, or my personal love of brutalist architecture which for some is a reaction against the modern age of architecture, or for me that I just love that it brings something primal and reactionary out of me because it's so different from normal. I think here ambiguity is the name of the game, and like an empty room it let's us fill it with our own ideas, and sometimes we just need to try something to see if we can get the piano through the door or be content with the cello someone else left in the corner.
Thanks for critiquing your own theory, especially critiquing the process of interpreting something too liberally (which I myself shall do shortly). Very nice to have it presented as "hey, what if you look at it in this context/from this perspective" instead of "i discovered THE TRUTH" :D
SPOILERS (naturally)
My own experience/theory (valid for no one but myself) though it's been years since I played it. I took the game's introduction to mean birth, and of course "the pussy gate" fits that. The game deals in both abstract and very concrete imagery, and presents it on a spectrum between fascination and reverence to horror and nausea. Almost everything in the entire game is greyish, commonly associate with depression. (However, you can just as easily attribute that to the game being made by one person, and he just did what he could without a graphical artist). As the game progresses though, the experience of isolation becomes gradually more oppressive, driving the protagonist insane, and ultimately to suicide; the jump off the cliff. Note that the scene before the jump is a desert, commonly associated with lack of life, which can be taken as a representation of how the protagonist ends up seeing the world by the end, but it's also if memory serves the place of the most vibrant scene in the whole game. When that scene ends and the isolation returns, the protagonist jumps, which is... I think ... one of the few, if not the only meaningful interactions the player can have with the world. The game is almost entirely comprised of observation and moving, but not interacting. To me, that lack of interaction over time reinforces the feeling of alienation, of being out of place because you cannot interact with the world in any meaningful way.
A few loose observations:
- Lucy is a nickname for LSD (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds).
- If you take a look at the author's twitter, there's a lot of talk about astral planes and meditation and general metaphysical stuff. Samsara - the cycle of birth and rebirth in eastern religions that deal with meditation - in my opinion connects well thematically well with the game introducing you to the chapter of "The Beginning" at the end.
- The sound that plays as you jump is the same as in the beginning of the game, which suggests a connection between the beginning and the end of the game.
- In the the desert feel-good scene, the light and dark moving "things" form a double helix (genetics/birth?) and the music evokes a sense of wonder and gratitude?
- After the jump, you fall through cogworks which may symbolize the protagonist experiencing the realization of the nature of reality.
- The final scene is unquestionably laden with horror, which could be a metaphore for the horror of realizing the cycle rebirth never ends
- Has anybody commented on that the absolutely first thing you see after the introduction is a broken slab? Why is it broken? To me, that suggests something is not as it should be right from the start. It seems kind of... unnecessary if it was just a visual cue to suggest it broke from the protagonists fall.
I do wonder if the author has either attemped suicide before himself, or if someone close to him has.
Alright... Private John Ramble out.
I've since taken a look at Limasse Five's Twitter, since I heard that apparently another project is/was in the works. There's definitely a lot to explore there; they were quite the prolific tweet-er at one point. Interesting to think how much of their inner thoughts like those seen on their Twitter sub/consciously made their way into the game.
How did you make all the video recordings where you move the camera however you want?
NaissanceE has cheats built-in to the Unreal game engine that I activated to be able to freely float around and whatnot. You can get a lot of mileage out of them and explore places that were never meant to be reached :)
@@jatsko3113yeah, press ` (top left of keyboard, below ESCAPE) to open console. to noclip, type ghost. to walk, type walk. to fly, type fly. to not die, type god (type again to disable)
i like to look at the behind the scenes using these
Oh damn, I never thought of it this way. Very interesting interpretation the game indeed, holy shit ngl I think imma replay the game
No, you're no the only biggest fan of this game, I am too, this game is just one of the most unic games to ever exist, different from everything, its almost not a game but rather a experience, its like a modern abstract painting but good, it doesn't tell a proper direct story, it doesn't have a direct objective, you don't have a reason to be there, yet you are, so all you can do is explore this place, even when its so frightening. The other mechanics aren't there to represent "a reason" to do things, they're there to fill some holes, because you're a human, when you run, you have to breath, if you fall from a high place you hurt yourself, we know the game has a protagonist, but you're just in her placa, like most games, you're inside someones head, having this experience, this absurd and abstract experience.
I could talk about this game for hours, but for now, I just want to say that your interpretation misses something quite important, you said you don't stick with this theory anymore, but I think you still hasn't thought about this specific thing, that the real protagonist of this game isn't Lucy, but the structure, it's quite interesting to revisit the game with this in mind, and great video.
This is really nuanced interpretation that I really like & I posit this: (Content Warning: sexual assault, racism, transphobia & other bigotries that intersect with sexual assault)
being the victim of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, is filled with a lot of conflicting oobelygoobely brain stuff. IE, contradicting influences I have no control over are pressuring me from the outside (like friends, family, or society) while equally contradicting & uncontrollable forces act on me from the inside (the messy conflicting confusing emotional & intellectual fallout. Now combining your interpretation with Jacob's interpretation about alienation; that lends more credibility.
Honestly, the more I think about, the more your "critiques" support your theory. I'll support this statement by adding another spice to the bowl: gender.
Once you add gender into all the above considerations, it just fits that much more & the more filter you put on it the more it works.
Think of all the above from the perspective of a cis, white, female rape survivor.
Ok, now do it all again but this time you're a cis white male sexual assault survivor & now the gauntlet has fundamentally changed because of how society treat these 2 victims very differently.
Now keep doing this over & over with different gendered & racial readings.
Let's muddy the water even more by changing the trauma just slightly: sexual assault that isn't capital R Rape For Various Reasons.
Like, the more I apply all the different lenses I've learned about & experienced in relation to sexual assault in general, my own experience of it, & how society treats it, the more this treatment fits.
This is the reading I feel will stay with me the most as I experience this game for the first time & I'm really exited for this philosophical exercise lol. Damn I'm so stoked for this I'm gonna have to put this queue on hold while I go play it.
@@jatsko3113 I thought you handled the topic very well honestly! Straight to the point, no frills, but also respectful. This was a great video & I'm looking forward to more!
idk i feel like the game makes way more sense from the babies perspective
It's funny seeing this again because the original video was one of the reasons I started reading BLAME! and I've since become a massive fan of it without playing this game. I might get around to it eventually but I guess I just haven't. ig I just like the environments more than anything else and seeing footage/speedruns/etc is more than enough to sate that.
Interesting and quite mostly metaphorical take on this game.
In meta sence you can definetly take it as either healing from the brink or loosing yor mind and exporiancing oblivion at the end.
My take on the game is more... Artistic and some may say "fanboyish", because I take playing Neissance as essentially an interactive way through BLAME (to an extent)
I take it more from Gmod expiriance (of all places)- in that game I tended to download a lot of rather big, intriquite maps and some parkour mod to basically explore the place (gm_boreal is my favourite, but I am still on look for that one damn metro map).
And well.... the whole "Let's walk through BLAME" attitude you can also blame (hehe) on the fact my first videoessay expiriance with the game was from Jacob Geller. Thanks to his vid I also learned about BLAME and Tsutomu Nihei (thx Jacob, the stuff associated with that series is awesome)
More content!
If this theory did have some merit, I would want to comment on how unsavory the option is for you to take the route to abort the pregnancy, thus ending the game there. For the game to warn you not to go that direction, with an almost threatening tone, and for the game to end when you reach that point comes across as really horrid. If the game was about Lucy's journey of recovery, the journey of recovering from a trauma like that doesn't end when you choose to end the pregnancy, so I feel it is incredibly unfair that the game ends there, almost as if to say you made the wrong choice and to punish you as the player for doing so.
I'm not sure if that necessarily puts a hole in the argument, but if this theory does represent the message the game is trying to get across, then I really. REALLY hate that scene. I don't know anything about the author but I somehow doubt that was the message they were trying to get across.
Im here watching this cause I cannot beat the game. Im stuck on a parkour section that is too difficult for me ;-;
@@jatsko3113 I've got the framerate counter on and I've not seen it drop below 60 but I've also not seen it go above 62
At times doing the platforming at the "one more effort" checkpoint (is that it's name?), it doesn't let me move anymore. Just randomly happens and I have no choice but to reload the checkpoint... It's at the part where the the music is really intense with female vocal sounds
Can't remember if I already responded to this because some of my comments went missing, but:
In that section, I do know that if you don't move fast enough the increasing winds will eventually catch up to you and blow you backwards. Since your framerate sounds stable, the only advice I can really offer is to try to keep moving forward - you have to constantly run through the entire thing. If you're already doing that, then I don't know what the problem could be besides a corrupted save or something, maybe.
Hope this helps!
@@jatsko3113 Yeah... I eventually got past that section by pure brute force basically
Repeating it many times and getting frustrated until I got it somehow
It used not to be free
if you are more interested in the world of NaissanceE read a manga called blame! ,you will find the answers for your questions
pewdipie made a review : ua-cam.com/video/6I4HDFSOc6U/v-deo.html
GREETINGS TO YOU COMRADE
Best 👍👍👍👍
Putting a bunch of random warnings at the beginning kind of completely undermines the point of content warnings. If talking about one of those things will ruin my day, but the rest are fine, how am I supposed to know if I can watch this video safely?
Also I loved this video, although I hoped for a better theory, the game is so big and surreal, and the theory seems so simple, although as said before I still loved this video great content, also have you ever made a video about Kairo?
you should go back to starting videos with "greetings comrades" really adds to it
i think theres something else to this imo
the cube creature at the start is black
the one found at the end is white
the white one may represent that the child is male?
I just played through this game with a friend and the headcanon i came up with maybe has some spiritual similarities but it's more half-baked. I thought of our avatar as a neurodivergent person trying to grow up in a society that they don't understand. We start out falling into a "bed" upon birth but immediately must begin exploring our strange environment. At first everything seems impossible to traverse, with people who half-understand us shedding their light sometimes in the right places for us and sometimes not, because we are difficult for them to understand. We grow up not seeing people, because we can't understand them and prefer to explore the machines of society that keep everyone alive, even if they aren't made to be played with. My theory is that the world isn't actually uninhabited; it's densely inhabited, but we are simply avoiding the people, or at least the vast majority of them who are content staying in their office megastructures which we only care to look at from afar. It's like when you walk around certain neighborhoods and rarely see people because they're all much more comfortable staying inside, unlike us. Our character realizes as the game progresses what most of society chooses to ignore, which. is the fundamental weirdness of everything built by humans, and how being even just a little different from the norm can make structures that are hospitable to some seem menacing and passively antagonistic to us. The puzzles all involve moving light to be able to move forward in the game, much like how to us interacting with people in order to get what. we need or want can feel like a puzzle with arbitrary rules, for which we have no natural intuition. The cubes seem to be others like us, who find their specific places in the fringes of society avoided by most, and the light are the people who can coexist with us and understand us somewhat, but are still too comfortable in neurotypical society to want to stay with us for very long on our journey when they have their own strange purposes to attend to. After a final leap into darkness (one of many we have had to take) we eventually elevate into the desert, which is where we find our own enlightenment and learn an artform that we can fall in love with and introduce to the world. (Or perhaps we find. a non-artistic calling, or a lover, or a friend. A hyperfixation that we want to make into something healthy and lasting, and share with whoever will listen.) The "performance" and the maze in the desert were the emotional high points for me when I played, they felt like the kind of spiritual awakenings that I as a neurodivergent person have had when becoming truly passionate about something. The final terrifying step which. we know is coming is to dive back down into the world with our new gift, and to carve out our niche. "The host" is obviously "the man" to whom we must stick it. If we can avoid being battered down by the passively powerful aggression of the society we are trying finally to introduce our true selves to, which is no easy thing, then we have found a beginning and can begin a new stage of life.
Damn a video of one of my fav games Nice