Video games evoke a broad range of emotions. Satisfaction, when you get past a particularly difficult section. Frustration, getting sniped from across the map for the nth time this round. Excitement, from unlocking a new character and envisioning the new gameplay possibilities. Boredom even, by design.
Yet, in the universe of human feelings, grief is rare in gaming. Genuine melancholy is a difficult emotion to express in any form of media; the agency that makes video games games makes it especially hard to pull off.
A decade ago, I played through an indie game called That Dragon, Cancer. It was made by a solo developer who embarked on his project as a tribute to his young son, who was diagnosed with cancer in early childhood and eventually passed away. At the time, he made the news for this unusual, but nevertheless touching, love letter.
Unfortunately, despite his heartbreaking backstory and widespread critical acclaim, his game did not achieve commercial success. After I finished the game, I wasn't convinced that grief as a unifying theme for games could ever work. Gamers played to escape reality and live their virtual fantasies; by and large they weren't necessarily looking to sob quietly in front of their PCs.
Since then, I've been on the lookout for other games ambitious enough to try to tug at these emotional strings. Video game writing has improved in the past decade, and the prevalence of indie game development has opened up more opportunities for new storytellers to experiment with the medium. The handful of games that left an impression, though, had more than just cutscenes and florid prose—they married the depth of story and environment with fundamental game mechanics to draw players totally into the world.
With each button press and analog stick movement, players implicate their own actions in the narrative.
Warning: major spoilers ahead. If you want to play these games and experience the full force of their storytelling, stop reading and go try out What Remains of Edith Finch, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a series of short vignettes that tell the story of a family stricken with continuous tragedy and death. I played as the sole survivor of the large extended Finch family, exploring a giant mansion and flashing back to relive the events that cost each relative their life. These deaths feel heavy from their individuality, where each standalone scene has its own, isolated gameplay mechanic. One scene has me as a baby looking up while the tub overflows with water; another features a simple rope swing at the edge of a cliff, where I gradually lose control of the pendulum.
As I discovered more rooms and replayed more last moments, their accumulated weight added to each successive macabre scene. There was a moment at the end, when I realized that my teenage character—the one trying to piece together her family history—was pregnant during the entire game. And had died in childbirth.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons doesn't bill itself as an overly emotional game. I went on an adventure with the two brothers, making progress by solving environmental puzzles along the journey. Its control scheme is unique: each brother is controlled by an analog stick and a trigger button, and solving these puzzles required me to use both sticks and triggers simultaneously to position, move, and coordinate the onscreen characters. Outside of this innovative use of the controller, though, its storyline and gameplay proceeded in fairly straightforward fashion. Until the end.
After defeating the final boss, an unfortunate turn of events injured and killed the older brother, on the literal precipice of the goal of their entire quest. After the younger brother buried his kin, I ended up controlling just one character on the return trip home. I encountered the same obstacles, but with only one half of my controls functional, my character was stuck—until I accidentally discovered that while the other analog stick had no character to control, the remaining brother still responded to his sibling's trigger. With each finger press, the younger sibling received an echo of brotherly support and love. I tapped that trigger so much that my hands cramped up.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an old school JRPG of sorts. I control a party of characters and wander around the map, advancing the story via elaborate cutscenes while fighting monsters and gaining experience. When I finished the game last year, it had the same feeling as finishing a great book series, a Pixelache where I wanted more adventures in this world with these intricate characters.
The ingredient that made Clair Obscur's story special was its focus on grief. In the game's mythology, people who lived to a certain age died on their birthdays, and its society started launching expeditions to stop the decimation only for every single one to end in failure and more death. The intro cutscenes are masterfully directed, to impress upon players the overbearing sense of resignation running through the populace, the fatalistic reality of knowing exactly when each person will die.
But what stuck with me were the player moments of despair. The game put me up against bosses that could not be defeated, even as my party exhausted themselves to make a dent in the enemy's health bar. It reversed expectations halfway through battle, where the main antagonist started healing my party instead of attacking it, eventually revealing that we were mistaken about the expedition's premise. On multiple occasions, I genuinely did not want to continue, knowing fully that any resolution would be narratively devastating.
Video games are unique because they give players control, and the primary feeling that this invokes is a sense of wonder, exploration, and freedom. To convey other emotions, games often borrow techniques from traditional cinema, sometimes to the point where games "play like movies."
But it is possible to merge static story with dynamic player agency, binding the player to the narrative in a wonderfully gaming way. From That Dragon to What Remains to Brothers to Clair Obscur, what started as niche has graduated into the mainstream.
