The island of Shelmerston is delightful, and relaxing to explore. You use Morris’s abilities to track down important personal objects and use them to find these potential Custodians. There are potential candidates to assume the position of Custodian, other notable deceased islanders who hold a special connection with the island and who may want to give up their ghostly lives or their desire to join their loved ones on The Other Side to take up the mantle of protector for years to come. As explained by Sparky, Morris’s also-unalive and now-talking dog, this is due to the island’s Custodian becoming weak after many years of keeping Shelmerston’s islanders safe. The main crux of the game is that Shelmerston’s volcano, which has lain dormant for generations, has begun to exhibit troubling signs of getting ready to be about to very shortly erupt. And so, in death, Morris explores Shelmerston and its inhabitants, from the island lifers to the native fishpeople, the mainland tourists, the parks and forests and everywhere in between, as he comes to realize that the beauty of life is in its gentle mundanity and ever-forward march, in the small moments you might only share with yourself, even if they won’t be remembered.Īt least, that’s what I was hoping for the game to be about. The museum is out of reach, both temporarily closed after his passing and likely not in the market for a non-living curator, if he could somehow continue curating after death. In spite of his radical powers of examination, Morris has no way of taking this wealth of information anywhere with him. Morris, and we, can see in fascinatingly thorough detail every item from the insides of an old CRT to a cross-section of the island’s tourist ferry to secrets even beneath the ground, waiting to be discovered in the living world by an archaeologist or shovel enthusiast. More fantastical still is Morris’s newfound ability to “cut in” to items, to pick them up and not only look at them but inside of them, through them, like an ethereal MRI machine that sees in full colour. Time around him passes in wibbly-wobbly weeks at a time, as major events are held, as businesses and stories change hands and open and close in the blink of a ghostly eye. Morris Lupton is who we spend our time with, in his ghostly form, as he wrestles with the island’s ever-evolving character, now impossible for him to record and display. Morris Lupton understood this, the innate value of the person and seemingly meaningless, and displayed all things in his museum with reverence for its impact on a personal level, not only its age or anthropological significance. Shelmerston museum wasn’t strictly historical so much as it was biographical, a living and growing record of the island’s life itself, where a blow-up camel float ring is as important to understanding it as a thousands-year old mummified indiginous tribesperson. A lifelong resident of Shelmerston, he dedicated his life to finding, documenting, and displaying pieces of the island’s history, from small local legends to big bold newspaper headline discoveries. This small obituary speaks volumes about Morris, despite not saying much at all. Evidently, he was a man worth remembering, whose contributions to the small island warranted a permanent addition to the landscape. On a beach out by Shelmerston’s lighthouse, lit softly by the rising sun, there sits a memorial dedicated to the island’s late museum curator.
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