Exploring Penacony in Honkai: Star Rail is like having the keys to Disneyland for a midnight soirée, but all the guests are sleazy film noir extras, and Mickey Mouse has taken the night off to let an anthropomorphic clock with the ability to manipulate people's emotions fill in. It's a morally dubious constructed paradise where everybody tells you what a great time they're having while the cheery facade is crumbling around them. Why yes, this does sound like regular old Disneyland, and it's this unexpected commentary on packaged 'happiness' that surprised me the most about the game's big version 2.0 update. But it's certainly not its only impressive addition.
For those not familiar with it yet, Penacony is supposed to be the "Planet of Festivities" where people stay at The Reverie. This is a gigantic hotel with special Dreampool beds that invoke shared experiences between all guests across twelve constructed areas - the 'real' Penacony where time stops in a neverending dreamscape. The Golden Hour is the main hub area inside this connected dream, and it's where you'll be spending most of your time exploring during the beginning of Penacony's story, and it's by far the best Honkai: Star Rail has ever been at immersing you in one of its worlds.
While Herta Space Station, Belobog, and the Xianzhou Luofu are all environmentally representative of their individual cultures, the huge Golden Hour area really aces what it might actually feel like to wander one of Penacony's surreal landscapes. The time is always one minute before midnight, so the party never has to stop. And so, temporally stalled, you explore the bright lights of the New Vegas-inspired streets and run away from billboards that chase you down dodgy alleyways, past extravagant shopping malls and guests throwing up rainbows. Floating, translucent whales replace clouds in the night sky, a volcano spits out toxic orange fizzy drink in the distance, and payphones tell you what your friends' dreams are while waving away the morality of such an intrusion. There's even a huge park with slot machines where you can spend tokens for the chance to get in-game prizes. That's right, the gacha game has added gacha games as part of its commentary on the fake happiness that money can buy you.