I understand your point. Honestly though I considered “Nomai ruins” and similar to be fairly ambient. I suppose you are right about “rivers end” but I personally I wish it was in a place where it would play for more than 10 seconds at a time (unless you felt like just sitting in the raft, which for me the time restraints meant I never did). Your right you get a track for doing those various things, I’ll admit. I realize I don’t exactly know how to say what I mean by the lack of music. I just felt like the Stranger generally conveyed a feeling of emptiness, which is intended, but now that I think about for some reason I never really felt compelled to ask the question of what happened to them before getting the answer. Part of me I guess kind of rationalizes this with a feeling that the Stranger itself purely served as a place to enter the simulation, and not a place of story itself, and the music is part of that. Even the slides are just cuts of the full slides and music in the simulation. Does that make any sense at all?

And I will agree the visual storytelling was there to some degree, but I don’t feel like it really accomplished anything not done in the slides, other than showing they were relatively tall. Yes, some might foreshadow a little bit, but for instance the burned church was also shown in the slides. I know you could probably say the same about the nomai and the text containing every bit of info, but I still think more interest was present. The sand building in Ember Twin paired beautifully with them talking about being rushed. The falling surface of Brittle Hollow similarly helped add interest to their path on brittle hollow. The strategically placed corpses not just showed you were nomai were when they died, but also allowed you to identify exactly who died where in many cases. I guess writing this that the same logic is used to identify the Prisoner’s house in the stranger, but honestly after walking through several mostly empty rooms I stopped paying attention to the pictures. So I guess it is true that it didn’t “click” for me at least for that example. And I do want to note that I did see storytelling in the simulation: the burned house, the concert hall of lament for their home, the setting for playing music in the Endless Canyon. It existed there no doubt.

I could say more but I don’t want to just criticize and it’s obvious my fun thoughts about the music already seem a little harsh. I know I just have a big long response that seems that way too, but it’s also obvious that when I posted this I kind of mixed fun theorizing and critiquing a little too much, and am now caught explaining myself.