Dread Delusion is a game about time. You might think it's about adventure, derring-do, killing gods and shaping the future, and you’d be right, but primarily it is about time. Let me explain. I won't be able to do so without spoilers, though, therefore let me also give you a fair warning that there are going to be SPOILERS AHEAD. SPOILERS!!! Don’t go wandering beyond this point if you haven’t finished the game and intend to.

But if you’re still here you know what you’re doing, so let’s proceed: a game about time, then.

You wake up in the game in a prison cell. I know The Elder Scrolls games turned having a prisoner protagonist into a meme, but it’s actually meaningful here. Being in prison puts you, in a way, outside of time. Time tends to lose its significance when spent in prison. You are doing time, as they say, only it’s not really time what goes on in there, it’s a warped version of it, devoid of agency, cut off from the flow, stagnant and starting to smell musty. Like your character is placed in an annex of history where time isn’t really reaching, or, rather, as if you, the player, were in a temporal decompression chamber, transitioning into the game from your own time, waiting to adjust to the way it flows in the Oneiric Isles. And, of course, once you start playing and your character is out of that prison cell, time reclaims both of you, fully and violently.

Although not explicitly stated, you soon notice that each region in the game has its own particular way of picturing time and interacting with it. Hallowshire, for instance, the first region you’re visiting, is caught in a bloody battle between the god-worshipping Wikkan past and the Apostatic bureaucratic future. The conflict is called The God War and is some 50 years old, but its consequences just reached Hallowshire, with the Apostatic Union's decision to tighten its grip on it, so what you find there is a conflicted present where future and past separate from each other violently. Past and future are divergent in Hallowshire, a rift at the heart of time itself.

Bordering Hallowshire is The Endless Realm, where time took a very different turn. Its denizens, the fabled Endless, made a deal with an unknown deity and turned immortal, at the expense of life itself. They're the common representation of undead you usually find in games, eternally craving the flesh of the living. In fact, they literally ate their brethren when immortality drained them of life, a mind-shattering experience that has become the centre of their being. As you can imagine, future has very little to offer in The Endless Realm, the entire kingdom being enveloped in this lethargic melancholia, where they are reliving over and over their tragically guilt-ridden past, unable to make peace with it. Most of them have retired in cyclopean mausoleums where they are waiting for The Ferryman to come and take them away. As a consequence, time in The Endless Realm is stuck in this eternal past that cannot be left behind, nor redeemed, and only grows heavier with the burden of immortality.

The Clockwork Kingdom, on the other hand, is focused on future. It is inhabited by progress-driven individuals who replaced their rulers with a giant man-made machine, The Clockwork King, who practises social programming and population control. An authoritarian and cryptic ruler, it literary erased the region’s past to better establish its legitimacy and can also erase its subjects’ memories in order to control them. Not only the past, but present itself is driven away from people’s minds, replaced by bottled visions fed into them by a profitable industry fully supported by the government. Between erasing the past and replacing the present, the region is filled with people who lost touch with their former selves and do not remember who they are anymore, constantly forgetting essential traits of their identity. While in The Endless Realm the past is a prison you can’t escape from, cursed to relive it eternally in a present that only adds remorse and torment to it, in this realm past and present slip through your fingers like sand in an hourglass and the only aspect of time that has enough substance and cannot be erased from your mind is the future. The essence of the relationship people have with time in The Clockwork Kingdom is that they’re not retaining it. They just keep rushing forward towards an ideal future as past and present continuously dissolve behind. No tradition, only prospection.

And that brings us to the final region in the game, The Underlands, the uninhabitable surface of the world. It was the site of a past cataclysm called The World Rend, which destroyed the world 400 years ago, turning it into the floating archipelago we play in. There, on the surface, though, the event is as present as if it had just happened, as if no amount of time passing could put any distance between it and the people whose lives it has forever changed. Thus, time is simultaneous in the Underlands, caught in an eternal present that contains at the same time the ruins of the past and the promise of a redemptive future, awaiting within the Cradle, where an Angel resides, with the ability to rewrite, in cipher, the very reality. So, it's like time is reconciling with itself in the barren wasteland of the Underlands, finding once again its unity and "continuity in (the) simultaneity" of the catastrophic cosmic event that suspended its structure and altered its nature in the first place. The ending can be seen, in this light, as if time had also been a character in the game, and the conclusion brought with it the resolution of a crisis, and returned it to itself in a state in which it could heal and be restored.

So, apparently, we see in the game several very different representations of time. What do they mean, what is the game trying to say with them? I think what it tries to tell us is that time is fundamentally subjective and doesn’t exist outside of our minds, or, if it does, we don’t really know what it is. Aristotle, in De memoria, and St. Augustine, in Confessiones, both tried to figure out how we perceive time and both pointed out the inherent subjectivity of it. According to these thinkers, past, present and future are not objectively different realities, but each of them belongs to a different activity of our spirit: the past belongs to memory, the present to feeling, or direct contemplation, the future to expectation, or desire. We cannot think in the past or the future, only in the present and about past, present or future, so the simultaneity of our consciousness unfolds into the successivity of experience only because we have in our intellect three different activities with which to unfold it: memory, feeling, and desire.

We recall, we feel, we desire about the same unique thing: time. This is how we understand it, how we appropriate it, this is how we make it our own. Past, present and future are facets of the same three-fold entity in our mind: the human subjective perception of time. We have no idea what time is, nor do we know how it affects us; we only know that this is how we perceive it. So, you see how this is a game about time?

However, this understanding of time is only a stepping stone toward the bigger picture, bringing us closer to the true message of the game: like time, everything else we think we understand is illusion. Every little thing our minds cook up to apprehend the incomprehensible world around us. Knowledge itself is illusion. We’re deluding ourselves that we understand this dreadful place we are in (“There are as many worlds as people in it.”). But we don’t really know what’s out there, what awaits us beyond this illusory blanket of understanding, past walls after walls of deceptive truths. We wrap ourselves in a comfortable, but horrible lie. A Dread Delusion.

Certainly not among Cyan’s best works, but it’s the most visionary of them all and it “links” perfectly into the kind of creative imagination they are known for. The puzzles have a real mechanical grandiosity to them, it feels like you're moving mountains around and redesigning the world about you. Having THAT MUCH power at the tip of your fingers feels fantastic throughout the game and is a clever new play on their old “circumstantial demiurge” favourite theme. Your ethereal companion lamenting that she can't be in your shoes doing all that is more reward than achieving Elden Ring's best ending and a feeling that'll stay with you for a long time, but, then again, Cyan always knew how to make you feel good for solving a puzzle. The story's a bit slow-release, granted, it can take a while to properly set its hooks in, but that delicious voice acting can easily get you through anything!

A proper Cyan game through and through, even though it feels more like a cerebral old age opus than a passionate youthful endeavour.

LATER EDIT: On second playthrough, the game really shines and it actually IS among Cyan's best works: your ethereal mentor’s rather cryptic monologues start making proper sense this time around and reveal subtle, nuanced writing (Cyan were never praised for the quality of their writing, but here they do an especially remarkable job). Her exceptional, sensitive, voice acting stands out even more this time. How she manages to convey all the passion and resentment in that detached and abstracted manner is simply breathtaking! She is marvellous! For all her envy of me for doing all those incredible things she only could dream of (and oh, boy, how she dreamed about them!), for all the good that envy of hers made me feel about myself being the one who plays the game, by the time I was approaching the ending a second time, it was clear to me that I had no chance against her, she was the real star of the show, it was her actions, her sacrifice that ultimately secured the mission, shaped a truer purpose for it and gave the game meaning, not mine. Definitely not mine.

And while at first Firmament establishes itself as a good puzzle game with awe-inspiring gigantic clockwork structures and astonishing scenery, on second playthrough it becomes a character study and an exercise in adoration for its subject. Cyan’s love sonnet for its own donna angelicata. A game that’s worth playing again and again if only for the exquisite pleasure of spending some more time in the company of such a finely crafted character.