Subahibi was constantly recommended to me, and now that I’ve mostly finished it, I can see why. It was definitely a reading experience that would be hard to replicate in any other medium, and I haven’t ever really read anything at all similar to it. It’s a somewhat poetic grasp on the ephemerality of life. The closest thing I’ve ever read to Subahibi is Notes from the Underground, where we see the insights of a typical social outcast who provides his opinion on society in general, and I really enjoyed Notes from the Underground, but that novel was much more literary while Subahibi is written in pretty generic prose (except for a couple of moments were the writing was genuinely good). The similarities end there, Subahibi is more like diving head deep into the utterly deranged fantasies of a lunatic, with each chapter providing a new character’s view of the events happening, and the reader is then constantly asking why, what the hell is happening? The first chapter is really quite boring at first, but I think that it has a lot of merit once you finish the entire game, and furthermore the ending leaves the reader with multiple questions about what just happened, each chapter leaves you more and more bewildered with events unfolding that are contradictory, characters endlessly defying time and space by suddenly appearing and disappearing. Another important part of the game is that it adapts Wittgenstein early work Tractus Logico-Philosophicus, which is a rather well-known work in the world of analytic philosophy, but I doubt the common visual novel reader is interested in epistemology.
The main themes taken from the Tractus is that basically that “The subject does not belong to the world; rather it is a limit of the world,” and “The limit of the world is the limit of my language.”
Those might not make sense from just reading them but basically all Wittgenstein is saying that our subjective experiences are ours and ours alone, the limit of the world is each and all of our experiences or I guess they could be defined as the ‘Transcendental Hypostasis”, and that the limit of the world is what language can express; in typical analytic fashion, all meaningful propositions in language is that which can be empirically verified, a proposition that goes beyond intersubjective experience is something Wittgenstein says “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Those propositions about the existence of God or whatever aren’t meaningless to
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