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’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.

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.