Well, I watched an incomplete playthrough of this thing on youtube a couple of years ago - and it seemed pretty ffing unplayable to me based on what I saw in that playthrough. Basically, you are randomly walking the village (I imagine the actual manual to this thing could've contained something like a map of the whole place, but, alas, we'll probably never know this after all) randomly stumbling upon some special events, the same ones in the same places, again and again. And when you stumble, maybe you can use some item, which you are supposed to use there by gamedesigners, and which you've got during your previous rounds of randomly stumbling around, and maybe you don't and you die and you get resurrected as a dog or something. The events are pretty much unconnected, or rather split into pairs, where in one event you get the item needed for the completion of the other one (on the other side of town, naturally). I think, if you know what you are doing, meaning, what's exactly where and what needs exactly what, you can complete all the events in the game over the course of, like, 40 minutes or an hour. Well, that's not counting the giant in-game wikipedia on, like, 11th century Japan, its mythology, Buddhism, and the like. THAT thing - I don't know exactly how much text there is, but I imagine, there are, like, good 5-6 hours of reading (of very dry, encyclopaedic content) at the very least - and, basically, the entirety of all the other content in the game, sort of, serves as this very barebones openworld-y illustration to some of the stuff you can read about in this wiki-thing. Moreover, I'd pretty much recommend first reading the entirety of the wiki thing, because, well, it provides the context to all the events (so that it at least becomes somewhat apparent, what all that stuff was initially supposed to be "by design"), and, well, the way the game itself is made, stumbling upon them "in the flesh" first feels more, like, OLOLOL SO RANDOM XD. I
think there also was some combat system to the whole thing, although I
really don't remember any particulars.
I dunno, me personally, I didn't like what I saw in that playthrough, at all. Maybe that whole image of a random bunch of unconnected events and random stumbling about, triggering the same events again and again, and blindly memorizing what's located where, is not the fault of the game itself. Maybe it's just that the person who was making the playthrough, was playing in, like, particularly dumb way, and absolutely didn't know what he was doing (which he totally wasn't). For all I know, maybe the "correct" way to play this thing was exhaustively described in either its manual (which, AFAIK, at least a couple of years ago, Teh Internetz totally didn't have) or in one of its "Wikipedia" pages. But, well, as for me personally, I couldn't make much sense of the whole thing, based on what I saw - and, moreover, I'm not particularly eager to take any sort of another look at it ever again.
So, these are my two cents on the subject matter.
Also, there is another game, which seems pretty similar in terms of what's it all about, to me (being, though, more of a "linear", instead of "openworld-y", experience), although, AFAIK, it's untranslated, as of right now. I'm talking about PS2's "Hungry Ghosts". Maybe, if "Cosmology" ends up being totally up your alley, it would be totally worth it for you to look up this game as well.
