The Grief Gardens

In The Grief Garden, you play as someone working within an archival system dedicated to preserving interactive narratives. The archive is suffering from corruption: some stories are incomplete, glitched, or fragmented. Your task is to explore the damaged archive, piece together lost or broken story segments, and repair the narrative integrity of the collection.

As you work, you confront both technical obstacles (data corruption, missing files) and emotional or thematic ones—loss, memory, and the fragility of story itself. The “Grief Garden” suggests a space where grief is cultivated or tended, perhaps pointing to narratives about mourning, erasure, or the emotional weight of what’s lost.

The story combines speculative elements (the archive as a semi-magical or futuristic space) with metafictional ones (stories about stories, archives, preservation). It asks: What happens when stories themselves decay? How do we care for or resurrect them?