* Area 1 (Tulip hot spring) + Dominant colors: pink and pale green + Start facing directly up. Tulip tube draws your eyes on the left side of the screen, away from the visual noise of the clover tubes. + The mood is distinctly unsettling. The pink colors¸ images of flowers, and intimate setting invoke romance, but the combination of the dissonant, echoing guitar music, the suddenness of the situation, and the undesirable partner (a corporate icon? seriously?) make the whole thing feel very unsettling. + There's a face drawn in the pink haze. It has hearts for eyes, but the wobbling curve of its mouth looks forlorn. My immediate impulse is to reach out to them, but thinking on it, I realize they may be a stalker of some kind, which makes the situation even more uncomfortable. + The hummingbird on the clover ziggurat pedestal (it occurs to me only now how strange that is) is a rotating sprite, which immediately evokes a pickup from Quake. I move onto it, trying to pick it up, but fail to do so, and am deeply disappointed by this, although I now realize that, even if I had the hummingbird, I don't really know what I'd do with it. + Above the area, there's a lightbulb with an image of the moon visible through the glass. For lack of a deeper meaning, I interpret it as a nod to the process of working with Unity; the game, after all, wears its unity-ness on its sleeve. + I eventually take the laughing cow in her embrace. Scene ends. * Area 2 (Cow Augusta) + Dominant colors: blue and white + Start facing towards the cow, which is slightly to the right of the center line. A corner of the daquiri is visible in the upper-right corner, red and white like a blood moon. + The music is timed so that, if you rush directly towards the deep fried cow, the bass-boosted section of the music kicks in just as it starts to dominate your screen, and the cow finishes its attack before it ends. This is the funniest fucking thing I've ever experienced in any media. + The visual design of this area is hard to make broad statements about, other than "I've not seen anything like it". + Unlike the highly abstract space of the previous area, this one's somewhat more concrete. You're in a city street in a sparkling (but otherwise boring) resort town. In particular, it reminds me of my experience of Augusta, Georgia, an old town along the Savannah River best-known for its golf courses that I once passed through on foot over the course of a few days. Its Broad St., I recall, was surprisingly dreary, considering its age and reputation. (It really looked exactly like the space in the game.) + Despite the concrete setting, the texturework is very symbolic. The buildings are textured with perspective photographs of skyscrapers. These monoliths depict skyscrapers, but in no way visually resemble skyscrapers; one is forced to puzzle out what they're supposed to be. The floor is textured with a repeating image of a potted shrub on a wooden floor, but overall it averages out to the kind of washed-out gray that dominates the wide sidewalks of many cities. + The background image has a bright red daquiri in it. Due to the buildings in the way, it's hard to get a good look at it, and realizing what those glimpses of crimson you saw through the alleys is is an odd but nonetheless pretty funny feeling. + The Standard Assets First-Person Controller script is tweaked in an interesting way here. You run by default, and holding Shift makes you walk. There's no difference in speed between the two states, but the way it changes your gait is remarkable. At sprinting speed, your gait is very short, so you waddle around with great gusto as you travel. Walking speed, on the other hand, feels like you're wading through water. The presence of a picket fence as a boundary makes you feel like you're a very young child, sprinting clumsily towards a misplaced toy. * Area 3 (Meditation room) + Dominant colors: White, green, and pink + Start facing across a hill, with soft, waving grass. The hill frames the white flowers that (for the moment) seem to be in the background, + I actually mistook the lamppost in the center for a sword buried in the ground at first glance, as its base was hidden by the grass and I hadn't seen the lamp yet. The lamppost reminds me of The Beginner's Guide, but I can't make a deeper connection than that. + The white flowers that form the border have a nice softness to them, complemented by the green glow. This place makes me feel safe and peaceful, less fenced in and more protected. + The cairn in the background image, towering massively over the space, is a stunning visual that dominates the entire space for me. I think the image of the cairn, combined with the music, do much to evoke the peace of meditation. + The roses surrounding the lamppost have a subtle hum that I only noticed when I looked closely on my nth playthrough. The ethereal beauty of their forms shimmering in a ring around the lamppost is as beautiful as it is mysterious. * Area 4 (hell) + Dominant colors: blue and green + oh god i hate it im gonna hurl + Distortion seems to dominate the area. The background image has had its colors stolen and replaced with changelings, and its space mutilated in green and blue smears. The previous places have all fely farily grounded, but this one's hanging platforms and baseless pillars feels unstable; the music, with its backward notes, contributes greatly to this feeling. One platform's texture shifts as the camera moves. We also see the laughing cow, our implied love interest, dancing behind a distorted field, a grin on their face that almost seems to be mocking. + At first, I thought I was to go to her again, but you can't even enter the cage (made of calculators) she's in. The funnel shape it makes towards the end drew me in, but I could go no further. I found this frustrating. + I'm glad that you get saved if you fall off the side. I didn't encounter it until I tried it to see what would happen, but I appreciate that it's in there. + The rotating squash and money above the spawn point are easy to miss, but they're neat. + The strawberry in the pit at the end is very interesting to me for its sexual connotation, but I'm kind of tired of writing these notes so I'll leave it at that. * dont decode this V zvtug unir sryg qvssreragyl nobhg gur ynhtuvat pbj vs V unira'g frra fb zhpu cbea bs ure