spoiler
Up until that point many players will have thought they could stop the supernova, that they could save everyone, they thought that was the point of the game, how you won.
To then be faced with the fact that there is no stopping it and that the star has just reached it's end.
It's like getting a bucket of ice water dropped on you realizing that there is no saving anyone, everyone will die, this system will be destroyed, this universe will end.
Accepting that end is hard, but I think the ending showing that all ending are also new beginnings, that everything is built on what came before goes a long way to letting people be ok with it.
Fuck I love this game.
Oh sweet I get to vent about The August Few: Amygdala by Sam Fennah.
So Sam is primarily a youtuber, he makes animations with these very unique and somewhat disturbing characters and over time he made a bit of a narrative using them, eventually he made it into a 1000 page book. As one might expect looking at his animations this book is very weird, it's got some extremely interesting and alien worldbuilding which challenges the reader a lot. As a piece of art this book is incredibly effective in that it makes the reader reflect on it's far reaching themes, but as a book I really kinda hate it.
At the core of the book is the question of what the ideal society is, but only one option is ever really presented, what I can only describe as anarcho-dawinism. When one character opposes this state and proposes the possibility of a kinder and more inclusive society she is betrayed, hung from a balcony over a crowd, she orgasms while choking to death, and "When the body was lowered, it was groped, defiled, spat upon, split." This is not presented as a bad thing, simply as the people rejecting her idea, the language used is very "marketplace of ideas."
At the start of the book Sam tries to disavow himself of what he wrote in an author's note, part of which reads: "The views of the characters are not the views of the author. This book is not a promotion of ideas, but an exploration of ideas." Sam did not need to make the characters orgasm when they died, he did not need to make them reproduce via necrophilic rape, he did not need to make every characters a literal baby eating cannibal, and he did not need to present social-darwinism as an ideal society, but he did, he choose to write these things.
I hate this book, I read it over a year ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, it is a great piece of art.