10,000 swords — a threshold cosmology

The mechanic in the game is simple: you die, you die again, the number of deaths becomes meaningless past a certain threshold. The swords stop being threats and become weather. Simone Weil calls this décreation — not self-improvement but the undoing of the constructed self, the one that needs to be defended. What I find interesting is that neither Weil nor the game is asking you to stop caring. They're asking you to find the threshold where accumulation stops adding weight. Past ten thousand swords, more swords is just more swords. Mai pen rai is maybe just the name for having crossed that threshold.