a youtuber i watched said smth to the tune of "spore isnt a terrific creature designing game with a boring and confusing endgame, its a mediocre space sim with a really long introduction" and like. credit where credit is due, i do think that's a pretty accurate description of the structure of spore, albeit not the quality. bc like. yeah, the space stage is all the other stages rolled together into one, and that's the point. all of the stages are always happening at the same time forever, you just followed one (1) species of millions through their journey, and the space stage is where you're finally allowed to figure out what everything means. replaying the creature stage after sinking considerable time into the space stage is kinda surreal for me because of that, like. events that originally didnt even register to me now hold so much more meaning.
during one of your migrations, your planet will experience a meteor shower, and a flash of light will roll across the sky. sometimes you will see spaceships. sometimes these spaceships will abduct creatures around you. other times they just observe. sometimes you will find nests that look like they should be surrounded by other creatures, but have only a ring of glowing pods. and you will wonder about those things, but ultimately move on because it doesnt mean much. but it does.
in the space stage, one of your goals is to colonize planets, and in order to do that, those planets need to be livable. not technically, of course, you can place domed colonies on fully barren planets, but those colonies won't be able to develop at all unless you nicen up the place. and step one to doing that is adjusting the planet's atmosphere and temperature, which can be accomplished in a lot of different ways, but one of the earliest you get access to is summoning a meteor shower. and the way the game lets you know youve gotten it to the point it can sustain the next level of life is by sending a flash of light rolling across the whole globe. those pods around creature nests? theyre cocoons. there were creatures there, but now the planet is changing, so they are advancing to the next stage of life. a tier 2 planet cannot sustain tier 1 life anymore. and in turn, when artificially terraforming, the player is required to fill in the food web themselves with creatures matching the planets current atmospheric conditions, it must all be done in order. you can't just grab two of every animal from your t3 home planet, haul them to a t0 rock, blast it with endless meteors straight into the goldilocks zone of t3 and slap down your new ark, you have to successfully stabilize each tier before you can move on to the next, and the plants and animals you fill those tiers with have to match, which means you need samples from other planets that are already at that tier. and suddenly the ships from before, hovering, observing, taking, make a lot more sense.
and there's a little quirk of how spore works that makes it hit even harder. see, the game certainly does come with a massive database of built-in creatures and ships, but those ones are really just placeholders. every time you save a creature design, every time you finalize a house, every time you finish a new spaceship design, spore saves that and integrates it into every other save on the computer, and will start replacing the default models you run into as npcs with your own creations. the more times you play, the more these worlds are filled with things you recognize, things you built, things you may have spent hours following and refining. spore is a game designed to be played over and over and over and over again, it WANTS to be replayed, it wants you to fill up the pages of its catalogue with creatures and vehicles and spaceships galore, it wants you to get attached to these beings as you follow them through their entire evolutionary chain, from speck to spacefarers, over and over again. all so that the next time youre a speck staring down a spaceship, it will be a ship that you yourself designed.
it wants you to feel the weight of eternity and endless cycles and the complexity of life. it wants to show you your place in all of it by taking you out of it, puts you in the seat of an immortal god hopping from vessel to vessel, and makes you watch your own ghosts drift by. it wants you to remember what it was like to be small the next time you are big. it wants you to see every single creature in the game, in the universe, as one with as long and complex and meaningful a history as you, to see yourself reflected back at you in every other life, and what better way could there be to do this than by giving them your own face?
also, people complain about the space stage not really having an end goal, and i don't disagree, but i don't view that as a bad thing. because like. what else would there be to do? all throughout the game, you are surrounded by creatures larger than you, stronger than you, more highly evolved, you are constantly being reminded that while individual lives have beginnings and endings, life does not, that this is a cycle that began long before you existed and will continue long after youre gone. that you are not, by ANY means, the main character. that you, the player, are not a character at all. your hosts change and die constantly, and even when the game has you settle on a final physical shape for your current species, it continues having the way through which you observe or interact with the world change, keeps making you design new vessels through which to exert your will, never lets you get truly attached to any one Thing that represents you as a constant presence. your will is distributed among dozens of lives, manifested over billions of years in fleeting moments. there is no one specific character on which the game can vicariously rest a congratulations to you, the player, without inherently violating its own premise.
the closest it gets is that a) your captain during the space stage is technically immortal as in they get "reconstructed" every time the ship explodes, but imo thats mainly just for out-of-universe achievement tracking? as by that point youre pretty much just playing as The Ship in the same way that you played as The Creature in the creature stage or The Tribe in the tribal stage. like, you cannot exit it ever, there isnt a creature youre piloting separate from the ship that can get out and walk around, and the ship by that point is pretty much just a "you are here" marker anyways because your scope of view operates on a galactic scale and b) the closest it gets to an ending is when you get the staff of life upon reaching the center of the galaxy, but even then it is made achingly clear that you are not the first being to do this, nor will you be the last. both within the game, as the grox have controlled that area far too long not to have gone in, but also on a gameplay level.
every save file is a star in the same galaxy. and it's not just a UI choice for save selection, it's not just sharing creature and vehicle databases, that menu is quite literally a map of the galaxy. and if you put in the time, you can fly to your other saves and visit the you that has already been there and done that. you don't get an ending because there not being an ending is the entire point. the game tells you that the universe has existed long before you and will continue to exist long after you. you are not special, you are not unique, and your ending does not stand out among a sea of billions of endings.
and yet, it also tells you that that doesnt make a single one of those stories any less valuable. it tells you that this is all there is, tells you that life is a meaningless cycle, and then asks you to start over again and find the meaning in that. it tells you that you are one miniscule piece in a picture bigger than comprehension, that an individual's actions rest on the backs of the billions of people who came before them, that no one person is the main character of anything, and that this is okay. it makes you feel small and then asks you to find peace in that smallness. it gives you the power to wipe out all life on an entire planet in an instant and then puts you right back in the shoes of those lives, reminds you that you are just as fragile as they are, and asks you to remember this the next time you hold power over another.
spore is a game about the cycle of life and evolution and space and ecosystems and the endlessly churning mechanisms of the universe. you don't get an ending because there isn't an ending you could have. the story of the universe is not one with a main character, the story of evolution is one that never stops, there are no endings in the face of infinity. you don't get an ending because there isn't a singular story this universe is bent to exist around. the world goes on, with or without you. you are small, you are insignificant, and you are temporary. it is a game about death and existential fear and how unfathomably old and young the universe is and the sheer SIZE of it all and the constant earsplitting scream that you are not special and that is the point. you have no Reason for being. you just Are. the game ends when you stop playing. the story ends when you stop telling it. you don't get an ending because there isn't one. and that is the point.
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