Komorebi's Small Attention to Detail Enamoured Me

Recently, I finished Komorebi after playing through 20 hours of text the length of several novels (wow, it really doesn't feel that long). While the narrative and world invited me to an existence unlike my own in the form of a magical land with future-seeing powers that can be both a curse and a blessing, there was something that really stood out to me — the attention to detail.

These aren't so significant that I needed to mention them in my review, but it's something I wanted to highlight — Klace's small additions made the world enticing and enjoyable in a way that made me want to explore it a bit more. It started when the characters were going to enjoy the 31st of December, the transitional day from 2041 to 2042, and I noticed it landed on a Tuesday. This peculiar date and detail made me question whether the developer had paid close attention to the day it actually landed on, and after a quick scroll through my calendar later, I found that New Year's Eve in 2041 will — in fact — be a Tuesday.

Now, this small detail alone might not be revolutionary, but it made me realise that the team behind Komorebi pays close attention to their own work, and it made me wonder what other additions there are. It was at this point that I started micro-analysing every small thing given to me and tried to see if a piece of information was hidden inside — could I figure out the various character's Komorebi through the details? Could I find a major plot point by the way things are described? The possibilities were endless merely by the fact that the game had given me the glee of putting the proper date in a day that is nearly 20 years away.

Surely enough, I found a lot of small details that hinted at various things, some of which I was able to catch before they occurred (and I cannot mention them for spoiler reasons). One of my favourites is the way items are cleverly named throughout the narrative — their colours indicate essential pieces of information you should learn about, but more importantly, it also reflects an important hint that isn't overly noticeable until more than halfway into the game, where one of the colours changes according to your character's relation to it.

Small details in games show care and love. From Easter Eggs to even details that can give you access to guess the ending is one of the many things that can make me fall in love with a world. Indeed, being able to decipher a story and feel like Sherlock Holmes himself because I was given a piece of information that connected with others lets me connect with a narrative more than how a purposefully deceiving one can. 

Whether it's because these bits of information show an extra depth of love poured into the games in the form of homages to inspirations both of real-life nature and fictional or because it helps connect with the world a little bit, these are all too essential to ensure the player can better feel part of the world. After all, who doesn't love connecting to the overall narrative? Small bits of information can be an inviting way to ensure you are allured to a universe, even to one as obscure and different as Komorebi's.

Heck, the team even went as far as to create an entire album to better connect with one of the main characters in the story. If that isn’t dedication to small details, I don’t know what is.