Remembrance

This game in the Single Choice Jam focuses on a single emotional moment. You are on a space station and are preparing for your mother's delayed funeral/burial ceremony.

You are allowed to bring a single object back with you. Most of the game revolves around looking at objects one at a time and remembering what significance they have to you and to your mother.

My father talked to me before about how sci fi is really about everyday human stories, just placed in an extraordinary setting to bring out different key points. This game is fundamentally about the relationship between a difficult but attentive parent and their adult child. The sci-fi setting serves to strengthen some of the emotions, like isolation and lack of self worth.

The reduction to a single choice makes sense thematically, since you are deliberating on a major decision you can't really go back on. I felt satisfied with my choice and didn't feel a need to play again.

Remembrance is an emotionally charged entry, which follows the player getting ready to put their mother’s ashes to rest. The trip allowing only limited amount of luggage, you can only choose one keepsake.

The entry deals with the themes of death and grief with delicate words, showing the good the bad and the ugly of going through the things that mattered and the memories linked to them. Though you have a choice, there is no wrong or right options there. All are important pieces of yourself, all matter.

I think I liked the box of recipe the best out of all objects. The connection between your mother and yourself felt the strongest and most emotional - I think I related to it the most. I liked the little nod of Jewish traditions hinted in there too, and the want to continue those traditions, in a way or another…

It is a powerful piece that left me without many words when the game ended.

Just before I played this game, my mom told me that I should get married next year, so that she and my dad would be happy to see all their children living happily and starting new families of their own. For her, I imagine it would be the end of her life's work of raising us. For me, it's another symptom of how much dread and affection I have for my family.

Remembrance plays on similar feelings: the player character's mother has passed away, and they can bring one of three objects of intrinsic sentimental value related to their mother on the spaceship back to earth to bury her body. The player reads the story behind each object and why it is a viable candidate to express the player character's ambivalence and distance from their mother. And then they have to make a choice: which object should they take and bury with their mother?

As a short story, this was a nice read. The writing is appropriately somber, and the science fiction worldbuilding provides an interesting backdrop for this story of grief. It captures what it feels like not to know how to feel about the people who have cared for you. As a short, single-choice Twine game, it was an effective and interesting one: the player has to choose for the player character how to grieve, and it's such a heavy responsibility that I remember pausing and thinking about my choices.

I see my single choice in this game not as the player character per se, but as a slight motivational nudge. Much of the game is about clicking the next hyperlink to get to the next page: only at the very end does the player have a choice to affect the story. While I was reading the thoughts of the player character, I was also quite detached from their perspective; it felt like I was reading someone else's diary, and I wasn't really internalizing their thoughts to roleplay as the character. I guess the lack of diegetic agency, aka the fact that I was doing nothing but reading and clicking to the next page, made me feel like I wasn't part of the story. It was their story, not mine.

So when I had to choose for the player character, it felt jarring. I had to choose for a fully realized character on how they should feel, grieve, and move on. The jargon term — ludonarrative dissonance — comes to mind, but that has always been used as a pejorative to indicate a failing of the game. But in this case, I think it adds weight to the choice because I'm some nobody whispering to the player character to choose, I don't know, the woodworking tools. I have to think about the other two objects the player character could have chosen, and what it means to leave them behind. It is strange to come to this conclusion, that the fully sketched out character and the detailed backstory of the objects made it hard for me to attach myself to the player character.

And I think that's why Remembrance is effective for me. To some extent, I feel similarly about my own parents and sometimes imagine how I would react if one (or both) of my parents were no longer in my life. But that's where the parallels stop: at the end of the day, I'm not that character in the space station wondering what to pick. The closeness of the narration already makes me feel like I'm invading their privacy. Paradoxically, the distance between me and the character makes my choice feel significant because it feels like I'm giving them a guide to life and beyond.

I don't have an answer for how to mourn the inevitable passing of my own parents. And yet, I have to give this character a satisfying answer. This dissonance makes me think about how I should prepare for this one day. I know that in the near future, I will be following a similar path to the player character in Remembrance; I just won't have the helpful voice of the player. Hopefully, I'll know which object to choose when the time comes.