this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou and Planescape Torment. I think both helped me think about death and reincarnation - what would it even mean to have a “soul”? Would it mean some sort of unbroken consciousness, or are we bits and pieces of different segmented ideas and thoughts loosely connected together?
The answer is you're a meat robot! We're all just chemical gradients that learned to think.
A lot of people find this really existentially problematic but I think it's fascinating. It's even more fascinating that the meat doesn't like thinking about it's meathood, and developed bits of brain meat specifically to think about souls & gods instead of reality.
Tong Nou offers some interesting explorations of the idea of dharma, which I don’t think it got in the same way before playing it. Even if we are ultimately electricity flowing through meat, we all end up with an idea of “purpose”? And the ultimate despair re: materialist atheism is that the answer to “why do some people just suffer and suffer and suffer?” is that things just suck.
In Tong Nou, there is a dharma or purpose underlying each life. There are some lives you instantly die when selecting, or whose purpose is to die. There’s one where you sacrifice yourself and become a sacred torch. Suffering given meaning.
Planescape has an afterlife, and your character is going to hell at the end of it. Forever. All of your actions only lead you closer and closer to maybe a moral redemption? But what’s really the point there? You’re going to suffer endlessly after all of this anyway.
There’s also a really good series of Oblivion mods - Ruined Tails Tale, and The Tears of the Fiend - that have captured this in a personally inspiring way too. You find out that you are a demon who stole the soul of the body you inhabit, that you cursed them to an eternal afterlife of wandering and suffering. Your attempts to fix everything make things worse. But what do you from there? Try to live a life which makes up for it?