Queen's Wish and Growing Up

[Minion]

Having just finished Queen's Wish properly and achieving the ultimate end with all enemies defeated and all goals fulfilled, seeing my little pixel avatar travel through the portal home and be reunited with his family, and reading the excellent ending, I can't help but think back on the long years since I first started playing Spiderweb games with Nethergate at the end of the 90s, and the realization that there is so very much about Queen's Wish that I would never have grasped as a child back then, but which I easily identify with now that I am an adult, with a job and a family and the responsibilities that come with them. Heck, back then even Jeff was a happy-go-lucky shareware developer without a care in the world and no kids. Just look at how young he looked.

 

Is there anyone else out there with a similar feeling of a great spiritual journey reaching full circle, or just feeling their age as you play a game about growing up, family, children and parents, and you look back on your own experiences and think “Yeah, that's what it was like”?

Edited October 22, 2019 by Minion
More emphasis on "was".

[madrigan]

I thought there would be more responses to this. I am glad you're getting so much out of this game. It's doesn't feel analogous to my life, though. The only things in it that I relate to are the basic conflict between parents and children, which is nearly universal; and the last line of the endgame, when it says that despite your activities and efforts, an eternal machinery grinds on all around you, beyond your control. The latter is much closer to how I experience life than your description of a spiritual journey. 

 

I'm not saying that you haven't been on a spiritual journey, I'm saying that kind of life isn't universal. We're all wired differently and we come from different kinds of cultures, different kinds of families, and different times. Recently I saw one of those "if you could live life over again, what would you change" discussions, and I realized I had no idea what I would change or not change, because I have no idea what really led to what or what would have happened if I had done anything differently, or everything differently. Everything I ever wanted has turned out to be unimportant, and everything I didn't plan for has become crucial. I'm almost fifty years old, and my life is not what I thought it would be, at all. But me at fifty doesn't even want what me at twenty wanted. I believe that randomness is the most powerful force in the universe.

 

Having a life that seems like Queen's Wish sounds pretty good though -- for some people. 😐

[Minion]

5 hours ago, madrigan said:

Everything I ever wanted has turned out to be unimportant, and everything I didn't plan for has become crucial.

 

That was a great way of describing the way things seem to have gone for me too, and I thought that was part of the character's journey in Queen's Wish, how they go from being recently come into adulthood from childhood and mainly concerned with the pursuit of personal pleasure to being responsible for not only their own lives, but the lives of people around them who they never even knew growing up.