crane tail (吊车尾)

tw: discussion of suicide, rape 

what is beyond grief and sorrow and desperation? it is not Just desolation, but SELF-ANNIHILATION 

optimized for mobile, nearly unplayable on pc

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crane tail was designed to be my last public english-primary game. there's a lot in it that reads as a farewell. there's a lot of finality in it.

crane tail is for many people an extremely difficult and unintiutive game. either crane tail is extremely intuitive and you can get all the dialogue in one try, or you will never get all the dialogue or finish the game, which in its briefest run is only 20 minutes long.

1. the first thing you should do in crane tail is talk to the beating rabbit-heart

2. the second thing, after pressing A, is to try another button to unlock the next dialogue-string. after unlocking the dialogue string, for example the B-linked sequence, then you can press A to proceed through the sequence.

3. all dialogue in crane tail is linked through button sequences. for example, there's an Button A-linked sequence, a Button B-linked sequence, a Start Button-linked sequence, and a Select Button-linked sequence. there are only four buttons, and in most of the screens, you will have to press all of them in the right order

4. the way you know if you've gotten all the dialogue is when you've unlocked all four sequences

5. after talking to the heart, you should wander around a bit. there is a large, writhing mass of guts and gore and viscera and ghosts and a glimpse into the abyss to the right of the heart. if you walk in its vicinity, you will warp.

6. after warping, you see a screen, a garden full of tiled mirrors in the upper left where you warp into.

7. with some walking, you see a perversion of that garden, a garden of guts, in the bottom left. this visual cue of the inverted / intestinal garden suggests there is something in the bottom right. if you walk to the bottom most right most tile, you warp.

8. the game is guiding you to go down and to the right from a higher elevated position from the left. you read left --> right and up --> down, like you normally do in the english language.

9. you see a mirror. enter the mirror from above --> below to warp to the next screen.

10. in the screen after, you become a different character, the fox-character you saw as a portrait briefly before. look for the mirror and run through all four sequences in the correct order. now that you know there are four sequences, please explore to see the correct order.

11. most of the screens in crane tail are almost entirely empty. the white screen in particular is an annihilating expanse of white, so empty it subsumes the white fox character who can only be seen as a transparency, only partially visible, no matter what color it walks on.

12. walk to the bottom most right most tile (going deeper into the depths of heaven's lace, going down and down below. heaven's lace / the scalloped pattern is like the scales of a fish, or an deep sea creature in the abyssal depths. this game is about the abyssal depths.)

13. this is the final screen. talk to the rabbit. there are only A and B sequences. you will know you have reached THE END when the text says THE END.

thank you for playing my game. this is my farewell. i will continue making and publishing games, but they will not be available publicly. you will have to ask for them. i am not difficult to find, if you look for me.

thank you everyone. さようなら。