Dead Sea

Dead Sea sells itself immediately with aethereal wispiness echoing last night’s etude: “Rows upon rows of tombstones stretch endlessly. / White orbs float above them.” In softchill breezes such as these Dead Seas’ feathery couplets lift flittery with the wind, “You walk a sandy path dotted with soft grains. / Palm-like plants grow sparsely.” To keep this stimmung from dissipating upon any errant arpeggio, a surprising humor stays our focus in puzzles where you freeze JRPG slimes in mixing up a Fanta® to sate a thirsty gravedigger. Such competing uplifts and downdrafts catch us liminally in an otherworld with all the lightness of a dream. When the gravedigger says, “How do I leave? Walking. I live in that town”, the joke’s spark stagelights carefully the scene its halfdark implies.

What a shame that this sylph succinctness starts to smudge with the offwhite writing, watercolors you didn’t realize would run and mud, and sadly the sensuousness of the symbolist sparseness slabs mudbricked when we linger long enough allowing it to dry: “Before you lies an endless sea. / Lead-gray water flows sluggishly. / All seems melancholy under thick fog.” In the first sentence, place, but also perfectly a lack of place; in the second sentence, a resonant specific to paint the scene; then a third sentence to impasto out the pleasure. Even when we keep quick to the path, sometimes still the sparse offwhite doesn’t blur into mist, the simplicity simply stays simple: “A white lighthouse stands on the cliff, / signal light rotating with mechanical clanks. / Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.” This has described a lighthouse to the benefit of those not in the know.

We do get imaginative imagist dabs of “Midway to the castle, / a hill rises from the calm sea” to Turneristically mark a whale that carry us through, but the weight that sags that finely first struck chord piles up, alas, as it always seems must, exposition. Somehow, in these lambent milds, we’re supposed to sustain all this: “That was before the God fell. / Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here. / This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt. / Even angels fell because of it. / Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’ / To remake the world, God first had to remove the ‘Stake,’ sparking a long war. / That era was called the ‘Dirt Epoch.’ / This lighthouse was built after the Dirt Epoch ended.” If that’s not enough, then I kid you not, the Mayflower.

This is intended to ballast the plot as the story’s symbolist purposing, but the plot already bobs on the surface: a Duke marries a medievally young bride, an illness nearly blesses her with death’s escape, but her soul’s then vesseled in a whale, so the Duke kills the whale to recapture her soul, which doesn’t work, we’re not sure why. Certainly, this works wonderfully as a watercolor expression, “He spreads his arms as if to embrace it, / but it floats skyward, unstoppable. / The Duke kneels silently on the whale’s back, watching it vanish”, but its effect doesn’t enjoin any of the machinery made to effectuate it.

More charming is the game’s ability to take the basic, plinth it, fog machine it, then gloom in the mood music, such that a saltshaker sings out “The whole land is brimstone and salt, a burning waste; nothing sown, nothing growing.” In its humor and its echoes, Dead Sea spirits our seeking more than the crumblings we collect from its scrolls.