Weird Grief

by Naomi Norbez profile

2021

Web Site

Return to the game's main page

Reviews and Ratings

5 star:
(0)
4 star:
(1)
3 star:
(6)
2 star:
(5)
1 star:
(1)
Average Rating:
Number of Ratings: 13
Write a review


1-13 of 13


- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 4, 2022

- Gwen Isilith , March 24, 2022

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A compelling but not fully successful portrait of mourning, December 9, 2021
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2021

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

This one lived up to its name for me, for a couple reasons that are more idiosyncratic and one about the way it’s written. I’m definitely glad I played it, but didn’t find it as emotionally resonant as I wanted it to be, despite how well-observed and grounded it is.

Starting on the idiosyncratic side: it was uncanny to realize this was a companion game to The Dead Account, which I’d played much earlier in the Comp – the main cast of Weird Grief are the friend and family group of the holder of the eponymous dead account in the previous game. I suspect this is the reverse of the ideal order, since Weird Grief is first in time and it also fleshes out the characters who show up only as screen-names in The Dead Account. Oddly, Weird Grief doesn’t go into as much detail on what exactly happened to Mike, the dead person, withholding information in a way that didn’t have much payoff for me. I suspect linking the games more explicitly, either by suggesting an intended order, integrating them into the same file, or shifting the way information is presented to provide analogous exposition no matter which is done first (though of course that would be hard!), might have been a good choice.

The other idiosyncracy in my response is that I’m unfamiliar with the subculture that takes center stage here – the protagonist is a furry who’s in a polyamorous relationship with the dead man and his widower – which is fine, but I sometimes felt at sea when trying to understand the norms around the relationship. Juniper, the main character, lives in a different city from Mike and Roger (the widower), and an invitation to move in is treated as a big deal, making it seem like the connection was relatively new or less formal. But she’s also specifically called out as their “third” at the funeral, putting her on a different level from another character who’s also present and had been a sexual partner for the couple.

My confusion about Juniper’s role and expectations tied in with the way she’s written. I didn’t find that she had a lot of interiority, or had a lot of direct feelings about Mike’s death (beyond a single admittedly-heartwarming anecdote that’s told a couple different times, and several reminiscences about sex). Partially this is the nature of protagonists in choice-based games, where room is generally made for the player to put their own stamp on the character. But here, this meant Juniper felt primarily like a lens for Roger’s grief.

This focus extends to the sex scenes – as the blurb warns, they’re here and they’re quite explicit. This sort of thing isn’t exactly my cup of tea, and I have to say that when I’ve experienced deep, soul-crushing grief, sex has been pretty far from my mind so there wasn’t much personal resonance. But I can see how for these folks, sex would be a source of comfort and bonding in a hard time, and definitely understand the artistic imperative not to draw a curtain over what goes on between the three character. Anyway putting all that aside, I felt like Juniper was sidelined in favor of Roger in these sequences too: in the first one, I don’t think she has an orgasm, and in the second, she’s more viewer than participant as the other two characters have sex. I assume this is intentional, and meant to reflect something about Juniper’s relationship with Roger, but once again my takeaway was that Juniper’s subjective experience was secondary to the piece, which feels like a missed opportunity given that she’s our viewpoint character.

The writing is strong throughout – the dialogue rings true, and I liked the focus on the logistics of the grieving period, albeit these folks ate too much fast food (there are lots of typos though, including one “double click passage to edit” error and an awkwardly double-nested parenthetical). And while there are few choices, they feel reasonably impactful. So the supporting pieces are all strong enough – I just wanted Juniper, structurally the center of the piece, to loom a little larger in the story.

Highlight: The characters are all winning, with Tammy, Mike’s sister, especially came through as a positive presence.

Lowlight: once again I played this choice-based game with Henry napping on me, but due to text size and other formatting issues it required a lot of scrolling when reading in portrait mode (I was going to say it’s hard to play one-handed, but that could be misinterpreted!)

How I failed the author: As I said above, this milieu is pretty foreign to my experience so I worry I’m missing, or misinterpreted, many of the social cues or other indications of relationship dynamics.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Zape, November 23, 2021

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2021

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting window into another world, November 9, 2021
by Rachel Helps (Utah)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2021

This game gave me an interesting a different perspective on what it would be like to be grieving a romantic partner with someone who was also that person's romantic partner. Additionally, the player character and her friends are part of the furry community. This is ignorance on my part, but I didn't realize that fur suits could bring a level of psychological comfort to the people who wear them. I guess I thought it was more like role-playing. I liked learning about polyamorous furries through this game.

The writing dragged a little in describing endless cooking and going out for meals. I would have liked some choices about what to make or how I felt when partner slept in so long that my pumpkin pancakes went cold. There were some choices about whether or not to have sex and how to have it, and those choices did affect the narration, but I'm not sure if they affected the ending.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Sexually explicit game about grief, so I think weird is an appropriate word, November 3, 2021
by RadioactiveCrow (Irving, TX)
Related reviews: About 30 minutes

While I don't inhabit any of the same communities as the author of this piece, that hasn't stopped me from being touched by their games previously. This one, however, didn't grab me at all and I didn't enjoy it. And the weird thing is that grief is present in my home at this moment unlike it ever has been before. My mother-in-law died recently and from what I've observed of my grief, but mostly of my wife's grief, it looks absolutely nothing like this. That is by no means to say that the grief portrayed in this story is not valid, just that I couldn't relate to it. This story, which is a companion story that features the same characters as the author's other IFComp 2021 game (which I did enjoy), is mostly a cycle of cooking and/or eating, sex, and the more traditional characteristics of grief. And the sex scenes are explicit, which isn't usually something I want to read in any work of IF, but interspersed amongst otherwise crippling grief just felt weird to me. I know the title of the piece is "Weird Grief", but it was just too weird for me. Again, that's my personal take, your mileage may vary.

This piece was written in only three days, which is somewhat impressive, but it also shows. There were numerous typos. Again, despite all of the above I might have given it three stars, but it hardly had any choices to make. That's a big thing for me, even in otherwise very linear games. I can only remember three screens that even had two hyperlinks on them. I also wasn't the biggest fan of the font or the fact that it was centered justified on my tablet, which made it hard to read all the dialogue.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Unimaginable pain, October 31, 2021

Weird Grief took me a little less than an hour to read. It is a pretty straightforward story that doesn't have any puzzles and very few choices. It is told from the perspective of a person who has lost a friend and must provide comfort for the deceased's partner, as well as find comfort of their own. Much of the story is conversation between a close circle of friends as they deal with grief and try to find ways to help each other through several days of mourning. It did a good job of giving me some sense of how difficult getting through a time like this could be. I found it to be sad yet hopeful, because even though the characters had gone through a tremendous loss, they still had each other and seemed willing to do anything for one another. I especially like the character narrating the story, Juniper; they were the one I was most concerned for. I had some moments of discomfort where I wondered if (Spoiler - click to show)Juniper's self-worth was too closely tied to Roger's needs. On one hand, Juniper seemed to only do what they were comfortable with, but I still got a strange sense that there was an unequal power balance (I understand that this was a difficult time for them both, but especially for Roger, and he may not have been entirely himself; yet, some of the things he said and Juniper's reactions triggered my suspicions. I do believe that the three central characters of Mike, Roger, and Juniper had a relationship whose dynamics I did not entirely understand, and that they only wanted the best for one another. I think I what I am trying to say is that the writing was strong enough that it got me to reflect a lot about this character and kept me apprehensive about their well-being). This game shares characters with another story by the author titled "The Dead Account." I played "Dead Account" first, but afterwards wished I had gotten to "Weird Grief" before reading the companion piece.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- OverThinking, October 21, 2021

- mediocre.marsupial (Australia), October 18, 2021

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Losing a friend and lover, October 17, 2021

This is a heartfelt, slice-of-life Twine piece that details the loss a beloved person and explores how the people in his life grapple with the gap created by his absence.

The writing is raw, real, and put me squarely in the place of someone battling grief after the loss of a loved one. I appreciate how straightforward it is in tackling topics of depression, sex, love, and the furry community, with dialogue that feels very lived-in.

I do wish there was more choice and interactivity in the story, especially since I became invested in the story and wanted to help shape the responses of the protagonist more in my play-through. I’ll also note that there are a fair number of spelling and grammar mistakes, but I wonder if this might be an intentional way to convey something about the protagonist; I didn’t notice this with the companion piece “The Dead Account.”

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Ann Hugo (Canada), October 4, 2021

- Sobol (Russia), October 2, 2021


1-13 of 13 | Return to game's main page