Concept 04 Reality

The second style. Reality on its own terms: how it looks, how it sounds, the shape of a Reality scene. High-level architecture in 00-two-styles.md. The Part 2 work that happens inside Reality (items invoking memories, sister, search) lives in 03-reconstruction.md. The cliff and the gate live in 05-postgame.md.

The place

Reality is one place: the protagonist's hometown. A small coastal town on the Welsh and Cornish coast in an imagined warmer climate. Painted terraces in seaside colours, the palette of Tenby and Aberaeron: pinks, yellows, sea-greens, sky-blues. Whitewashed walls. Palm trees in places. A high street that smells of rain and citrus. Mediterranean light on a British coastline. Faded grandeur with sun on it. Ordinary, lived-in. Pulls from real reference points; sits on no map.

The map is geographically static. The hometown does not grow; the town stays the size it was when the player first walked through it at the break. What changes is what is in it. Across Part 2, things are added: people who become reachable, objects that were not there before, conversations that open as the protagonist is ready for them. The same hometown, revealed in passes.

Visual register

Gold-hour. Weighted. Plainer than Construction. The light is slant afternoon rather than full midday; the shadows lengthen; the air carries dust. Saturation drops a notch from Construction; line weight thickens; compositions hold longer pauses.

Characters are at their actual ages. Less vibrant, less full, deliberately unconstructed. The Six Marks still apply (per the artist world bible's section B); their expression here is plainer warmth, specific detail without gleam, breathing posture without performance.

The pull of Reality is its honesty. The player ends up wanting it.

Touchstones: Spiritfarer's quieter moments, Lake, Omori's Faraway Town. Loss is acknowledged; the prose breathes; the rally is not the engine here.

Audio register

Reality is acoustic. Bustle, wind instruments, rooms with people in them. Where Construction is bright synthetic music with a melodic chip-tone heritage, Reality is the air outside that synth.

Across Part 2, the two styles converse in the soundtrack: synth and acoustic in tension, the weight moving toward fuller arrangement by late Part 2. At the cliff, the music thins. At the credits, full orchestra reaches for both wonder and weight. Synthesis. Full direction in SH-281.

The shape of a scene

Reality is interaction-driven, not rally-driven. The player walks into a scene, does small attentive things, leaves. Each scene is hand-crafted: layered state, contextual interactions, dialogue, descriptive prose, the present-and-attentive puzzle shape.

The structure-level commit: not pong; not inventory recombination; being present in a room and finding what wants to happen. Specific puzzle mechanics (interaction surfaces, scene state, dialogue layering) are downstream game-design work and live in SH-279.

Scenes hold memorable items the protagonist carries back into the construct; each item invokes a memory. The mechanic itself is in 03-reconstruction.md; what matters here is the shape: scenes are hand-built, return-supporting, layered with state across visits.

The cast in Reality

Reality holds the real-world version of every cross-style character. Each is at their actual age, in their actual life, plainer than their Construction-render. The player meets them across Part 2.

The sister. The tinkerer's real-world counterpart. Zach's younger sister. One of the first reachable people in Reality. Detail in 03-reconstruction.md.

Martha and the partners. The cashier at the actual newsagent; the others as they actually are. Not coaches here, just people the protagonist knew.

Zach. Present in Reality from the break onward. Not approachable directly until the cliff. Detail in 03-reconstruction.md; the cliff meeting in 05-postgame.md.

The protagonist. Reality-render of the MC. 49 in Reality, 26 in Construction. Same character, real version.

Fern is Construction-only. No Reality counterpart. Fern's reality is the cliff (05-postgame.md): the place the friend group used to jump from, the place the friend died.

Period

Construction holds 1991. Reality sits in 2014. The protagonist is 49 in Reality, 26 in Construction.

Production notes

• Reality is finite hand-crafted content. The hometown is built once with iterative additions across Part 2.
• The sister is one of the most-visited Reality characters. Her scene supports many returns.
• The cliff is a separate location built once. The same cliff the friend group used as a jumping spot, the same edge the friend went off, the memorial bench at the top dedicated to them. Re-enterable through the unlocked gate (05-postgame.md).
• Specific Reality tooling (interaction surfaces, scene state, dialogue, navigation) belongs to SH-279.