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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A view of grief through a dead person's messages, November 9, 2021
by Rachel Helps (Utah)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2021

In this game, you are a moderator of a social media site who looks through messages to a social media account for a user who is suspected to be dead. You get to look through messages to the person to see if you think they're actually dead or not. This isn't a mystery game--it's very clear that the person in question has died. This setup allowed you to see the way grief affected people over time, without awkward time jumps. I thought that was a clever way to explore the theme of grief.

In the second half of the game, there's a (Spoiler - click to show)group chat with timers on each person's messages. I felt a little impatient with the timers, but at the same time, I thought it was a cool way to simulate a group chat. I think an animated ellipsis could have helped me to wait without worrying that something was going wrong.

Your choices don't impact much of the narrative. However, the hypertextuality of choosing what message to read really immersed me in the role of reading the messages as an outsider. This game has the same characters as Weird Grief. I preferred this game to Weird Grief. Also, if these games were inspired by real-life loss, I hope the author is doing okay.

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