The initial experience of Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries is not a tutorial in the traditional sense. The first life lived is the tutorial. Its purpose is to organically immerse the player in the game’s core themes of mystery, subjectivity, and remembrance; not by explaining them, but by making the player live them.

An Invitation

The game begins in a state of cosmic potential, fully loaded before the following sequence unfolds. Calling back to the golden era of gaming, the player is invited to experience a dramatic opening sequence that sets the stage for their journey; the first doorway into the magic circle. Pressing escape will skip all of the following and display the menu.

Ribbon Engine and Tiny Bow logos appear, followed by the noxabellus logo. As these fade in and out, the musical score builds; a blend of ethereal, contemplative, and slightly melancholic tones, composed of both digital and organic textures.

The scene transitions to distant, dim stars. The void stretches endlessly, a primordial abyss without form or order. Shadows shift and coalesce, hinting at shapes that never fully materialize, as if the cosmos itself hesitates to take its first breath.

An isometric grid emerges over the dim stars; its lines etching themselves into the void with deliberate precision, one by one. The grid imposes a fragile order upon the chaos, a latticework of potential waiting to be filled.

Small particles shimmer into existence, drifting aimlessly in the 3D space above the grid. They flicker like embers, their movements erratic, as though testing the boundaries of this nascent structure. Gradually, they gather and coalesce, drawn together by unseen forces, forming the image of a galaxy. Its spiraling arms stretch outward in a delicate dance, rotating just fast enough to be perceptible; a subtle reminder of the immense forces at play.

After a few moments, the dim background stars stir, their faint light growing stronger. They drift across the void, deliberate yet unhurried, as if guided by an unseen hand. The stars weave intricate patterns, their brightness intensifying until they form a luminous script against the darkness.

Gradually, the words take shape, their meaning emerging like a revelation from the cosmos itself: Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries. The letters shimmer with an ethereal glow, their presence both commanding and serene, as if the universe has paused to inscribe its purpose into the fabric of existence.

The last star in this sequence flares brightly, gathering its strength before releasing a radiant shooting star. The streak of light cuts across the void, leaving a shimmering trail in its wake. At first, the trail seems ephemeral, fading almost as quickly as it appears. But as the shooting star draws closer to the camera, the trail solidifies, carving a path through the darkness.

This trail expands, forming a spherical void that hovers over the galaxy rendering. Within this void, a new star ignites; a raging ball of fire, heavily stylized yet realistic, surrounded by a halo of darkness. The trail itself stabilizes into a sharply defined graphic, overlaying the galaxy and framing the newly-born star.

As the trail stabilizes, handwritten words materialize along its length, their strokes deliberate and purposeful. Simultaneously, a crystalline structure emerges from the graphic trail, at first integrated with it, then wholly distinct as it envelops the star. It forms a strongly faceted structure, some facets allowing a window to view the plasma within, while others project a menu. This projection appears through jets of plasma at first, then stabilizes into stylized 3D iconography rendered in an in-world style, as if living objects have been summoned from the star’s energy. The options appear with a quiet inevitability, fundamental truths waiting to be uncovered. The musical score swells to a crescendo, its harmonies echoing the visual spectacle in a moment of perfect, resonant unison.

This moment sets the stage for the player’s journey, presenting choices that are not merely functional but deeply tied to the game’s themes. Each option represents a facet of the metaphysical framework the player will explore. While descriptions will be shown as tooltips for accessibility, they are crafted (where feasible) to align with the game’s ontological language, grounding the player in its conceptual foundations.

For a new player, the path is set. Choosing Eidolon or Confluence is met with a simple, diegetic barrier:

To become an author of worlds, one must first understand what it is to live in one. This can be manually overridden in the Balance menu, but the intended journey begins with a single choice: Anamnesis.

The Choice of Awakening

Upon their first journey, a new player will be presented with a choice of “Origin.” This is a meta-choice that determines the nature of their first awakening, offering a path of gentle introduction or one of profound challenge.

• The Inheritor (The Sanctuary Thread): “Awaken into a world already saved by another’s sacrifice. Your goal is to understand and protect their legacy.” This path places the player in a stable, established Tapestry like Homestead or the Sun-Sheathed Vale. Their first life will be a guided experience, a lesson in community, belief, and the nature of a world built on the “Host” philosophy. This is the recommended path for a first playthrough.

• The Glitchborn (The Path of the Scar): “Awaken as an echo in a dead world. Your goal is not to live, but to escape.” This path plunges the player into the raw, unfiltered reality of Fallow. It is a punishing, cryptic, and deeply challenging experience for those who wish to confront the game’s darkest mysteries from the very beginning.

The Glitchborn Path: An Awakening in Fallow

A player who chooses the path of the Glitchborn has no accumulated Eidos to shape their first life. Their initial Incarnation is therefore a plunge into the unknown. They are guaranteed a Thread of a harsh fiber, for every new soul awakens for the first time within Fallow: a broken, primordial reality where the rules are different and death is not an escape.

The game does not ask you to build a character on a stat screen. It asks you to Awaken into a life already in progress, as exemplified by the Botanist and other scenarios.

In the Botanist scenario, you awaken as Kaelen; a newly minted xeno-botanist, in the immediate aftermath of a starship crash. The world is a blur of twisted metal and alien flora. Your Subjective Interface is glitching, overlaying traumatic memories of the crash with the raw sensory input of this new world. You possess a single, useful, but dangerously incomplete Fact: the ubiquitous, bioluminescent “Sun-Kelp” that blankets this coastline has vegetative tissues that are edible when cooked.

This is the core of the onboarding process. The player learns through inquiry and interpretation:

• Who am I? You discover your name and role from your own uniform, your available skills, and the topics that populate your Conversation menu.
• What are the rules? Your first act is a test of the game’s core systems. Another survivor, Rhys, operates on a fearful Fiction that the glowing kelp is radioactive. Your Fact is pitted against his Fiction. The conflict is resolved when you act, cook the kelp, and eat it, demonstrating a truth that is more powerful than his fear.
• What is my story? Through your actions, the community elevates your partial knowledge into a totalizing Faith in you as the “Seed-Sage,” the one who understands the benevolent land. You have learned how belief is born.

The First End: A Death with No Escape

Life in Fallow is difficult, and the consequences of misinterpretation are absolute. For Kaelen, the botanist, this end comes through a tragic, beautiful, and fatal misreading of reality. The very Sun-Kelp that sustained the community enters its reproductive cycle, releasing beautiful but lethal airborne spores. The initial Fact about its edibility was true, but it was not the whole truth. The Faith the community built upon that incomplete knowledge becomes their undoing.

Your Subjective Interface fades to black.

The screen remains black for a moment longer than is comfortable, then text appears:

The player is forced to begin Anamnesis again. This is the First Harvest.

The First Harvest: The Cycle of the Trapped

Upon this first death, the player enters the Reflect phase. Here, for the first time, the game’s metaphysical language is revealed. The chaotic, lived experience of that first life is distilled into its essential components:

• Underlying Diegetic Facts Revealed: [Fact: The organism has a two-stage life cycle.], etc.
• Personal Eidos Gained: [Fiction: The Myth of the Seed-Sage.], etc.

This initial, modest harvest of Eidos teaches the player that a life, however brief, is not a failure. It is the raw material for understanding. It is the only way to gather meaning.

But this is where the second twist comes. After this reflection, the player is not taken to a celestial workshop. They are thrust back into the world, perhaps days or weeks later. Kaelen’s story is over. They may find the site of the failed settlement, a silent testament to their first life. They might even awaken as a different survivor in a different part of the same crash site, given a chance to live a similar scenario again; with new meta-knowledge.

This is how the player learns the first rule of Fallow: death leads to rebirth, but rebirth is not escape. You are trapped in a cycle. Your new goal is not to thrive, but to find a way to break the loop and escape this broken reality for good.

The First Release: The Glitch in the Weave

The player may spend as many lives learning the harsh rules of this world as they need; each one ending in death, reflection, and a forced rebirth. The player’s true “first quest” is to find the exit. This is not a matter of dying again, but of using the knowledge accumulated from past lives to discover an in-world, narrative-driven “glitch” or “backdoor” — a scar in the fabric of the cosmos left by the first, violent Unraveling. They may also escape through true Transcendence.

The act of escaping is the true completion of the initial experience. It is only after successfully navigating this cosmic escape room that the player earns their first true release.

The Promise of the Eidolon

Upon escaping, the player finally returns to the main menu, changed. They have not just died; they have survived and escaped a cosmic prison. The option for Eidolon is no longer a locked door. It is an invitation, and the Eidos harvested from their entire ordeal is the key.

The initial experience is complete. You have been transformed from a confused survivor into an aspiring creator, and learned the core loop not through text boxes, but through living, dying, reflecting, and finally, escaping. You are now ready to take the meaning of your first life and begin the true work: weaving a Tapestry of your own.