Narrative

If you don't understand some of the concepts, check out the breakdown page!

The Abstracted Forests of Waru

A story about duality and perspective.
There is never just one truth.

List of chapters

Field of Divine Serenity

Ending 1: Break Free

Ending 2: Ignorance is Bliss

Completionist ending 3: The truth below

Theory 1: War God struck a deal

Thanks for reading until the end! I hope it was interesting!

You are a young deerling called Isi.
Deerling are anthropomorphic mystical creatures that shows traits of humans and deer.
They are kind of nature, usually about 1,30 m (4'2") tall and tend to live up to 50 years.

The Grey Canopy

You wake up confused in a humid, gloomy looking forest with giant trees and small pools of cloudy water. There's mist in the air and several broken down structures around you. Little light comes through the thick tree crowns and there's almost crystal-like formation of polygonic shapes scattered over the landscape, growing out of the trees and ground.

In the distance through the thick air your view is blocked by a wall made of giant vines, also laced with thesame brightcoloured anomalies.

You seem to have no recollection of what why you are here and what you were doing, but the state of this environment makes you uneasy, so you decide to explore a bit, hopefully finding some answers.

Later on you meet other creatures like you, calling themselves Deerlings, but these Deerlings are different from you. They also have the matte coloured shapes coming out of them that the plants have.

Some able to have conversation, but seem disproportionally frightened and desparate to escape the walls. They say that they're trapped and that this world is ill-fated. That god is a traitor and city has gone mad. They're crawling and clawing at the wall, begging for the light to be brought back to the world.

Others are way bigger than you, more mad and aggressive. They are wreckless and destructive, attacking you with no specific reason.

One particular deerling is frightened by you, because of your bluegreen shawl. He says it has the colours of 'Lighthome'. Vague memories return to you of having heard that name before. Is it a sacred building? The scared deerling tells you that Lighthome is upwards, away from the wall, more to the center of Waru, but is too stressed to be more clear in their words.

You remember that Waru is the name of this world!

You decide to head for this so called Lighthome in hope of finding more answers about the dome and what's happening to the flora and fauna in socalled land Waru.

Leaf Climb

As you head away from the wall you, to your surprise, find even bigger trees that you were amongst before. And how! These trees reach so high you could barely see their crowns.

You follow the frightened Deerlings advice and make your way up.

As you come closer to the top you start seeing buildings and little creatures. It was Lighthome! Lighthome was a city within the giant trees leaves!

Lighthome

In Lighthome you meet a lot of healthier happier looking deerlings. Reaching out to you for help, offering you food and shelter. They tell you about their lives and how their God has saved them from the war that has been going on for years outside the f , protecting them with the shielding shell around the world, as well as given them this abundance of nourishment and happiness.

One Deerling in particular shows you around, let's called him Di.

The Lighthomians are thriving, but something feels off.
You ask about the Deerlings with the polygon shapes, and Di looks shocked and shuts you up by putting his paw on your mouth. You immediately get side-eyed by others as well and you wonder what you did wrong.

He brings you to a more secluded spot to tell you explain things a bit more.

Di tells you about a parasitic material that exists within this world called The Abstraction. Whenever any creature looks in a socalled pure reflection they go mad and become abstracted. You will lose your sense of self and become a monster.

He admits of also sometimes thinking about whether it is really true or not, but he is happy living like he does now, so he doesn't want to deal with the consequences of finding out. Why try to fix something that's not broken, right?

You wonder if it's true as well, since some of the abstracted deerlings you saw in Grey Canopy were so far gone, but some truely still seem to be aware and intelligent.

Di tells you about the secret dumping grounds, where the city drops everything reflective or abstracted and keeps it silent so Lighthome can remain happy and peaceful.

You ask him to bring you there, you feel a strong feeling that this dumping ground is where you will find more answers. The real truth.

He is hesitant but sees the determination in your eyes. Something in him tells you you áre able to handle whatever happens down there, unlike him and the other Lighthomian Deerlings.

You know what you have to do, but the thought of it gives you shivers down your spine.

You say goodbye to Di and start scaling down the dumping grounds. With you newly receiving ability to float down with your shawl you safely end up in the most disturbing chaotic area yet.

Hidden Hollow

As you reach groundlevel once more you enter a cavesystem underground, underneath the giant trees of Lighthome. This cave is filled with glass, water and mirrors (or shards of them anyway), as well as the polygon shapes you've seen a few of before in the Grey Canopy, but these feel much different. It looks like the roots of the trees above have been abstracted as well, creating interesting rocklike structures.

The colours range from bright pink to dull blue and they are truely everywhere. There is some plants left, but there's more unnatural elements than natural around you.

This place feels almost magical, like the heart of the world. It's inorganic, unlike the rest of the forestbiomes you've traversed before.

Here you meet Ro, a deerling that looks very different from any other you've met. His face is half abstracted, but he sounds wise and aware. He carries a leaf with him as a shield against the shards of mirror, glass and abstracted things that fall from Lighthome. Ro explains that abstraction is indeed not what the Lighthomians thing it is.

He tells you the Lighthomians seem to be brainwashed, not thinking for themselves anymore. Scaring themselves into being too afraid to leave, not wanting to look past what they know.
They keep telling themselves they'll be safe by banishing everything reflective and abstracted, but it's already too late.

Ro explains the abstraction is already within everything in the forestdome. Every tree, every mushroom, every deerling. It's just not visible. He tells you about abstraction having a dormant and active form, and that when you look into a true reflection, instead of infecting you, it áctivates into its visible form.

The forestdome became a closed ecological system ever since the dome was formed, which meant deerlings have been consuming plants interlaced with abstractions for generations. They thing they are most afraid of already happened decades ago.

Active abstraction expands you mind, gives you the ability back to think as an individual. It makes you realize how the war outside the dome might have been over for years already as well, and the outside has been safe. It might be that the god did help us by giving us nourishing, but álso limited us from reaching our full potential by trapping us within this world. The truth is that we don't know.
Understanding and accepting that we don't know gives true freedom.

Sadly it does come at a cost. For mental freedom you must give up part of your physical form. No every deerling is able to handle what abstraction awakes within them, and some even die from it.
The purer the mirror, the bigger the chance you'll be able to handle the abstraction.

You realize this might explain why some abstracted deerlings in the Grey Canopy were so anxious and some were agressive, they mentally couldn't handle the truth, as well as being surrounded by imperfect reflections, making their process of abstraction more rough.

So technically the Lighthomians were right that you can go mad from abstraction, but it isn't madness inherently.

Ro tells you he feels a strange energy around you. He decides to show you the purest mirror in the Hidden Hollow, the one true mirror, the mirror that made him the way he is. He tells you to be careful, since this is a sacred mirror, the biggest reflective surface left unshattered.

As you look into it a big silhouette of a dark six-armed figure appears, looking down on you. They look familiar.
You feel a very strong connection to them. Have you been here before? They reach out one of their hands.

Something within you is stronger than yourself, making you right back out to them as well. As you touch the mirrors surface you go through, grabbing their hand, some happens. You hear shaking, you see light. So you abstraction appearing from around your touching hands, the mirror around it shattering. A blinding lighting. Sounds of shattering glass, then darkness.

There you are, it all makes sense.

You feel whole again. You did it. You made the dome. You are the Deerling god.

You don't know why you did it or whether the war is still going on, but you do know you have the power to undo what you've done.
You thank Ro and escape the Hollow through a tunnel upwards that appeared from the impact that your transformation had on the environment.

Field of Divine Serenity

This is it, you can feel it. Your journey is almost over.

You enter a calm field. A soft breeze ruffles the green healthy grass, no abstraction to be seen. This place feels sacred.

In the middle of the field, the center of the world, is a diamond shaped platform made of stone, it looks like there used to be some sort of shrine of statue there.

You feel a rush of energy go through you. This is where you created the dome and lost your power and memories.

You have two options:

Ending 1: Break Free

You break the dome and free the world, with the chance of finding a century old war and bring death upon your people. Maybe the ecosystem will collapse. Maybe the abstraction will spread over the entire planet. You will also most likely lose your godpowers because it takes all your energy to do something this huge. This will start a new era, entering the unknown.

Ending 2: Ignorance is Bliss

Or you leave the world as it is, not spreading the abstraction further outside of the forestdome world, leaving the Deerlings to live with the undertone of fear, never learning the truth about what's going on outside of the dome. Potentially having the ecosystem collapse at some point once if too much of the abstraction gets activated, possibly creating havoc among Lighthome.

You get to decide the fate of the world in this moment. There is no right answer.
You base your decision on the information you've learned throughout your story.

However, if you go through all the optional content of the game, unlock all the abilities, beat all the bosses and uncover all secrets, you'll gain access to a sub-area in the Hidden Hollow called the Forgotten Den. Here you can get to the third and last ending:

Completionist ending 3: The truth below

Here you'll come face to face with a giant creature that lives below the Domeworld. Here you'll learn that the abstraction is caused and created by this creature. It interlaced all the flora of the world with abstraction in its invisible dormant form and feeds of the deerlings by letting them consume those dormantly abstracted plants. Deerlings have certain cells within their bodies that can change abstracted plantscells into nourishment for the creature, so the creature needs the Deerlings to survive. Once the deerlings either die or relieve their waste and give it back to the flora, the creature feeds of off them.

As last but not least I want to share some theories I've written about how some things could potentially turn out to be, but which I'll never fully confirm in the game itself, this is for player to figure out themselves.

Theory 1: War God struck a deal

This is how the Deerling God looked before they created the dome. Back then they were more aggressive, more in touch with nature, less so with the Deerlings. Back then, 500 years ago, they even fought in the war between the Deerlings and the outsiders who tried to steal their resources and destroy their city, together with the Abstraction Serpent as their faithful companion. The God mostly communicated with only the Serpent, who saw Deerlings as mere weak lesser creatures, as prey. The God still cared about them, but more as pets than as their own people.

The war seemed to be endless and the God became desparate, so they made a deal with the Serpent. The Serpent would lend them their strength to create the biggest strongest floral structure this world had ever seen, a wall to end the war, but the Deerling God would have to give up their powers, and the Serpent would have to go dorment underground and feed of the Deerlings in order to stay alive and keep the dome strong. They did it and 500 years passed. The Serpent grew enormous, becoming the core of the world, keeping the Dome’s flora healthy and strong, but Abstraction slowly spread more and more throughout the world.

The God slept for 500 years, and woke up in the outer circle of the Dome as a small, normal Deerling themselves.

This is where the story begins.

Here's the first version of my gameflow model. Click to expand.

Below here you can see some idea sketches for maps of Waru.

Thanks for reading until the end! I hope it was interesting!

If you want to learn more about the Abstraction, its symbolism and more, check out this page!

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