Castles In The Sky puts that front and center. It is not a game that you play and then reflect on later. It is the coffee, the cello, the cornbread of videogame experiences. It is meant to be taken in the moment as a wholly unique and beautiful experience that is wholly available to you in its entirety at the moment you experience it. Other games based on the beauty of experience, like Gone Home or Dear Esther, work because they resonate with you. The player is meant to be marked and marred by the pieces of those games. Idle moments in daily life become instances of piecing together and parsing the narratives and what those games can mean. Castles In The Sky doesn’t want you to do that work at a later date. It needs you to take the moment of play and embrace it, enjoy it, and leave not with fragments but with feelings that drift into the back of your mind and sleep there, sated.

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