High On Grief

I want to preface this by saying ahead of time that I have a very specific framing of this game in mind:

I don't think the author thinks this game is realistic, or something that should happen. I read once a theory that our dreams are a place for our brain to try out ideas that are forbidden in real life, things that couldn't happen (like flying or all teeth falling out in class) or shouldn't happen (like kissing someone we really shouldn't). It's not that we subconsciously want those things, it's just a way to see 'what if'.

This feels like a 'what if' scenario to me, a chance to explore an alternate reality where we (or characters we control) do something we could never do in reality. The game itself even explicitly states that at one point, that the characters are expressing feelings the author has in reality to see how it would feel.

So, with that in mind, this is a game about taking your dead abusive mother, cremating her, baking her ashes into marijuana brownies, and eating her one piece at a time while calling friends.

It's clear this is a fantasy or wish-fulfillment scenario--real cremations are around 5 lbs, which is a ton of food (there is a recipe for pound cake which is 1 lb eggs, 1 lb flour, 1 lb butter, and 1 lb sugar, and it makes two 9x5 loaves. So 5 lbs of ashes mixed into enough ingredients to dilute it would be some really big brownies). Similarly, having 9 close friends you can call about and share your biggest traumas with is something also unrealistic for most people.

So what is the point of this scenario? To see what it would be like if you really let loose. What if the person who's hurt you the most passed away, and you literally destroyed their entire earthly existence while deconstructing every painful memory of them?

It's fruitless to say 'you shouldn't do that' or to explain why this philosophy is wrong or how it goes against my personal beliefs. It's clear the author thinks it's wrong! Very clear that one should not eat their mother. Mother-cannibalism goes against his beliefs as well. But that's not what this game is really about.

I wonder if writing this out was therapeutic. There are a few scenarios in my life that I know both can't and should never happen, but I have to wonder what it would be like, to explore those possibilities in the written word.

I found that mobile (in landscape mode) worked best for audio, with most lines in the game being voice acted.

I thought the hub and spoke style of this game was cool, particularly how you reached the end credits and had to rewind each time but the game still kept track and commented on how many paths you had taken and crossed out used ones.

I have a huge backlog of IFComp 2025 reviews to post from the author's forum. This was the one of two I had extra notes on, and it took up a lot more space. I think that will tell you about the impact this work had on me. I was ready to look at things in the past, and coming back to it six-plus months later, I realize I've had more ideas. Most of them are for me, and the big task here was making sure I was talking more about HoG than, well, myself. I repurposed a lot to my general writing-for-myself, and it still spilled over.

Bez's works always present me with a problem when reviewing in that, yes, they're about Bez's experiences or fears, refracted, but I sure do wind up talking about myself a lot. I actually intended to look at Yancy earlier during IFComp 2025, but then Charlie Kirk got assassinated, and, well, I had thoughts about that. Charlie Kirk's murder forced me to look a similar question to "how much respect do we give the dead we were in conflict with," namely, "how much respect do we give the dead who probably looked down on us?" (TLDR: not much. Hey, it's been six months. I don't feel bad saying this about Charlie Kirk.)

High on Grief (HG) is a relatively short work, given it takes place at the funeral of Yancy's mother and in the immediate aftermath. They did not see eye to eye, but everyone says "Oh, what your mother did for you" or also takes some angle on "but you don't really know her." (Neglecting, of course, that Yancy probably spent more time with the mother than the outsiders, and knowing someone is a two-way street. Among other issues.) I'd imagine the people around Yancy's mother, while kind on the surface, have self-selected, as Yancy's mother seems the type to ghost those who say "Hey, you're kind of out of bounds here."

Whether or not this sort of thing happens a lot in real life (Yancy asked to talk neutrally-at-worst about a hostile mother,) people certainly think about it and fear it in other context. I've had several adult authority figured who have either been useless or worse than useless, but they sure seemed to know a lot, or "you couldn't hate them." Some were more tangential, like the teacher who hard-sold me on how I really should be more interested in their subject, and if not, I was wasting my life.

In other words, they could not accept me for what I was. I had one teacher die during the COVID year of Parkinson's and my immediate thought was "why couldn't he have died of COVID?" And there was the teacher above, who was worse, whom I really WANTED to die of COVID, but who didn't. Which is ... not charitable. Let's just say the department head would've been much more receptive to my complaints than I thought he would be. There was intimidation going on. And these were flare-ups. Many years on I was able to write down my thoughts and why they didn't treat me like an actual person and why I deserved more. I wish I'd gotten there quicker. Maybe lashing out would've helped me do so.

So I definitely see where Yancy was coming from, and I remembered this, and I also realized I hadn't thought about these teachers much, which is relatively healthy. I wrote a lot about this sort of thing in the authors-only subforum for 2025. I needed to write it but it doesn't seem to be what I want in the final review. After all, on the forums there are those (details) collapsibles so people don't have read things. Here, there aren't.

The one thread running through is that Yancy's judgement and experiences seem to be repeatedly invalidated. The Pastor Dalton character in particular fits here, as someone who close to gets it, or who (as opposed to the mother's enablers) is willing to show basic respect without expecting fawning in return, who even avoids the "I let you heathens in here and you act all nasty" emotional blackmail, and it's extra frustrating to have them give a boilerplate text which ends with well, you'll feel less upset once you've cooled down, or now's not the right place. And yet whether or not Dalton means to be condescending, it feels that way. "See her as she truly is." (I thought only God could claim to do that!) Remember the good times. This reminded me of a sort-of friend I had who showed me stuff and that seemed like good times until I realized they'd balance it with some nasty backhanded jabs. Dalton will say God is a Mystery, etc., God works in mysterious ways, but he can't quite say Yancy has friends who can help more than he ever could, and those mysterious ways can occur even if you don't believe in God!

With regard to lashing out I'm reminded of Winston Churchill's quote on Democracy: "now's not the right time to say such things, even if every other time is worse." It's always too soon or too late. This is discussed in the story. But it's something I've had to deal with, even though the stakes may be lower.

So I had similar thoughts even though I'm a very different person from Yancy. I often wonder if I'm as far off in the weeds as some chemtrails conspiracy theorist when I think "Seemingly good person X wasn't so good." But there's a flip side to this. Some people I assumed everyone liked actually weren't well liked at all, and the smiles around them WERE forced, and I grieve the loss of peace for not realizing that. I haven't been called the wrong pronoun but I remember being sweet-talked I was too old for certain toys and later called "that kid." Or I've had people let me know I'm less of a person for liking boring things (e.g. not needing constant excitement,) or less of a man for not liking certain things. By family or otherwise. I'm still shocked to see people in this community have their family as testers. And each time I do I realize my family wasn't hostile but there sure was a lack of support or willingness to share happiness.

HoG offers only a few choices, and I think the one that matters least is one that would seem like the most dramatic. Do you give a standard funeral speech or do you just say screw it? The second leads to the pastor comforting you above, and either way, you need to call one of three friends. Or, well, this is where the "high" part of the title comes in.

Because the big dramatic moment is when Yancy makes pot brownies out of their mother's ashes. It was a vow to themselves, sort of as revenge. It has echoes of The Dude and Walter smoking Donnie's ashes in The Big Lebowski, only it's intentional, and it's funny to think of what Yancy's mother would think of drug use. I suspect Yancy had some guilt feelings about hearing their mother say "I deserved better than to raise a drug addict. I did everything right. Right?" (Note: "addict" is Yancy's mother talking, not me. And it certainly seems Yancy's mother has, obliviously, turned certain risk factors way up on the dial. But my immediate reaction was to think, Yancy's mother would frame a personal choice of Yancy's as a referendum on the mother, as if Yancy were trying to prove the mother's Great Mother Credentials wrong, but you just can't prevent someone going bad.)

I had a mini-revelation/recall with all this. I remember reacting to certain bad news by playing too much FreeCell, which is not drugs, but it can be seen as its own sort of spiraling, though a more legitimate and respectable type. I often came away with one or two ideas at the end, but (I later learned) not as many as if I'd just kept my computer off. So potentially addictive behaviors are a thing. And I realized that I certainly had the same dilemmas Yancy had -- even in college, I remember wanting to write a story about the horrible teacher, but it felt disloyal. What I wrote featured a classmate named Krusty LeGrand telling the main character (roughly) "anyone'd be grateful to be in teacher X's class! I'm like one of the biggest nonconformists out there but I wouldn't mess around if given that big chance." I only regret not following up and writing something better, sooner.

That's my revelation, but Yancy has a revelation that fulfilling this long-term fantasy (one that probably helped stave off worse depression & is relatively harmless as fantasies go) could mean three different things: is it revenge, is it something silly, or is it making things worse?

You have a chance to replay after this, choosing how to look at things, and you call a different friend and can revise what you think based on this. So I think this is saying you don't have to focus on what you should have said at the funeral, and that is worth spinning in your mind instead of the funeral. It's what we hope is the case, and we have no proof it is. But we have friends to stabilize us, or we deserve to, whether or not we are good people. Calling back to the Charlie Kirk example above, I watched a lot of YouTube videos focusing on why we shouldn't lionize him as a martyr, and we can say this without being horrible people. It provided a logical path through, just as HoG provided emotional justification for not being perfectly understanding of people I disliked in person.

Balancing respect for humanity with not respecting certain people's actions is the sort of tricky balancing act that weighs you down even if you don't have the environment Yancy has. We've all had someone like this, because these people actively make themselves present in other people's lives, and they of course aren't going to hand you a permission slip to block them out of your life, and they'll never admit to being awful. It's a universal problem, even if they "only" partially invalidated us for who we are.

I could picture someone watching my 17-year-old self reading through HoG, even though Twine didn't exist back then, and making a snide comment about "Hahaha that's weird, you're not going to snap too are you?" But my 17-year-old self could've used that. Or the company of people who would "get" or need something like HoG. I'd be less defensive now, and I'd feel less need to justify myself. Yay progress. Boo progress happening too slowly.

After all this woolgathering, though, I took a step back. I thought a bit. And suddenly I asked the question: sure, Yancy may've made a scene at the funeral, but ... what if the roles were reversed, say, if Yancy were driven to suicide? I could picture Yancy's mother taking shots both passive and overt at "well I tried to understand them" and perhaps eliciting comfort and "you did the best you could." And while Yancy's behavior is easier to call out, it's also more likely to help Yancy become a better person. I couldn't see the mother being reflective after the funeral.

I’m turning 45 in a couple of months, and while I like to think of myself as having maintained an admirable flexibility of mind and try to at least be aware of broader cultural trends even though many of them aren’t especially relevant to me anymore, there are times when I play a game and sure do feel an age gap separating me from the author, and the one I experienced when finishing High on Grief was especially acute: how in the name of all that’s holy does this game, whose inciting incident is the main character’s decision to take drugs laced with their parent’s cremated remains, fail to acknowledge that the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards did exactly the same thing? OK sure in his case it was snorting the ashes with some coke rather than baking them into pot brownies, but still – High on Grief’s protagonist, Yancy, makes a point of emphasizing how uniquely bizarre their actions are, when there’s an incredibly famous precedent exactly on point, at least for those of us of a certain age! This would be like having a game where the main character rides naked on a horse to protest taxation and everyone’s like, never heard of that one.

Admittedly, the reason for the omission is likely that High on Grief doesn’t take place in our reality; I think it’s only adverted to in the cover art this time out, but from playing previous games featuring Yancy I’m aware that they live in a world where everyone’s an anthropomorphic animal, and I believe there was a zombie apocalypse not too long ago. Still, there are points in common with the real world – Yancy’s deceased mom, for example, was a Christian, and she used her religion as one element in a relentless campaign of verbal and emotional abuse against her queer and autistic child. The game doesn’t get into much in the way of details here, beyond noting that she continually misgendered Yancy, but I think that’s a reasonable choice, since the focus here isn’t on rehashing specific incidents; instead, it’s about how Yancy comes to grips with their complex feelings about their mom, and her impact on them, now that she’s gone.

The particular way this plays out is, again, via a non-health-code-compliant pot brownie binge; as Yancy starts to get high, questions start bouncing around their brain about why they’re doing this (they’d originally mentioned the idea as a dark joke in high school, but that only takes you so far), what their mom’s death means, and more. Depending on how you answer these questions, you wind up phoning one of ten different friends for support in your dark night of the soul. Or rather, you wind up phoning all of them – after the conversation the game ends, but the blurb and ending text are very clear that you’re intended to play through all the options, and the game crosses out choices you’ve already picked to make sure you call the last friend as you eat the last piece of brownie. Oddly, this is phrased as “rewinding”, despite the fact that Yancy’s table accumulates notes from the previous conversations and previously-eaten pieces of brownie don’t reappear, which is a violation of causality not nearly as jarring as the fact that Yancy knows they’re a character in a piece of IF and occasionally addresses the player, speculating on what the author is up to.

Despite the apparently simple setup, then, there’s a lot going on here, mirroring the roiling stew of emotions Yancy is experiencing. For all that they’re clear that their mom was terrible, and terrible to them, they acknowledge that she could be kind to others and there are a (very) few positive parts of the legacy she’s left them. But their overwhelming feelings are angry ones; there’s very little actual grief here as most would recognize it. The dialogues provide an avenue to unpack all this, since each friend provides a viewpoint on one particular angle: one friend who’s a parent themselves has perspective on the ways parents influence their kids, while an autistic one commiserates by talking about their own struggles with people who are intolerant of the neurodivergent.

These are all written screenplay style, and generally work well; there’s a preponderance of therapy-speak, and again, Yancy often speaks in generalities, but those seem like plausible choices given the scenario. But ten may have been too many – it’s hard to add too much variety to the dialogues since they cover pretty similar ground, with many of them starting with the friend saying some slight variation of “I heard your mom’s funeral just happened, must be rough from what you’ve been saying on the Discord”. It’s also hard to get a sense of such a big supporting cast, especially since the game doesn’t provide any real context for who they are. I dimly remembered a few from earlier games, but for the most part they’re distinguished only by one or two obvious traits, without much room for nuance; again, I think what’s here works fine, but I wonder whether the game might have hit harder with half as many characters, but deeper dialogues that granted them more personality.

The other element that didn’t have as much payoff for me was the meta flourishes. There is a payoff of sorts for them, engaging with what exactly the player is doing when they make choices on Yancy’s behalf and how that relates to the mom’s domineering approach to her relationship with her kid, but this felt more like an intellectual connection than an organic, emotional one. Instead, it’s Yancy’s authentic confusion and defiance that stuck with me; devouring a parent is a highly symbolic act, and not one undertaken lightly, after all. I’m not sure Yancy was entirely justified to do what they did – but then, I don’t think Yancy is sure they were entirely justified, either. Even for those in much less extreme situations, it’s easy to recognize the need to move past your parents and let go of their influence on you, but easy too to feel ambivalence about that.

Except for Keith Richards – to my knowledge he’s never said he felt bad about snorting his dad, he just thought it was awesome.