It is and has always been one of the wildest and most appreciated things about this game to me, the way it just installed a mental framework in me for accepting the unacceptable.
Anything and everything you've ever known is going to die. That is the starting, baseline premise of the story. Which means that anything you do in it - any hours of fun, any laughs, any exploration, any beauty, is done with the constant reminder of that utter finality in the background, spaced 22 minutes apart. Done with, in between, and in spite of that.
It doesn't need to matter to be worth it. It doesn't need to not be about to die in fire to still be beauty.
Several dozen hours of that, set to music that starts playing in my mind whenever I could most make use of the reminder, is the gift this game gives me for times when everything feels lost. It amazes me, as it always does, just how powerful of a thing shared between humanity a story can be.
