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.

This one resonated a lot with me. I was glad to get to follow all the threads of Yancy’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions about/to their mother’s death; there are a lot, and some of them are contradictory, because this is a situation where of course their feelings are complex and messy, and the game did a great job exploring that. While initially I thought some of the conversations with the friends felt too neat, too pat, the game itself called this out, with Yancy’s sort-of diary entries reflecting that while they may have told their friends they agreed with their advice or found it helpful, really they just said what their friends wanted to hear while knowing things aren’t actually that simple or easy.

There’s also a meta element where Yancy talks to us, the players, about the fact that they are the main character in a game. They wonder whether they’re really a person, and essentially ask us to treat them like one, because there is a real human behind their existence, who created them and has given them some of their (the creator’s) own trauma and complex emotions. This made me think about the vulnerability of sharing a work like this, and how it’s reviewers’ responsibility to take care with how we approach writing about it, because when we judge the characters or emotions on display, we could very well be judging a real person.