The Games-About-Grief Canon

Games have a default setting for death, and the default is that death is a fail state you undo. Load the save, try again, the world forgets. This is a fine arrangement for an action game and a terrible one for a story about loss, because the medium’s most characteristic verb — retry — is exactly the thing grief will not let you do.

So the interesting question for this list is a formal one: what does a game do with its own machinery when the machinery is the problem? The twelve below all found an answer that lives in a system rather than a cutscene. Some of them are hard to sit through. All of them are doing engineering, and it is the engineering I want to talk about, because the sentiment is the cheap part and every one of these earns its way past it.

The five-minute one

Passage (Jason Rohrer, 2007). A hundred pixels wide, sixteen tall, five minutes long, made for a competition that demanded games fit a fake handheld. You walk right. A sprite joins you and now you are two sprites wide, which means the narrow gaps between the treasure chests are closed to you — companionship as a collision box. The screen scrolls the pair of you toward the right edge, the perspective compresses as you age, and at some point she is a headstone and you are still walking. It is the most efficient thing on this list by an order of magnitude, and Rohrer built the entire argument out of sprite width.

The ones that put it in the controller

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Starbreeze, 2013). Josef Fares gave each brother a thumbstick and spent four hours training your hands to operate two people as one. What the game does with that in its final act is the single best use of a control scheme in the medium — I will keep the specifics vague, since the whole thing runs about three hours and the moment only works once. The design principle is worth stating plainly: muscle memory is a resource a game can build up and then break, and breaking it hurts in a way no script can.

Before Your Eyes (GoodbyeWorld Games, 2021). It watches you through your webcam and advances the story when you blink. You are a soul on a ferryman’s boat recounting a life, and every scene you love is a scene you will end involuntarily, because eyes blink. There is no way to hold on. The mechanic is a cheap piece of computer vision doing the work of a whole thesis about how memory declines to be kept, and the game is honest enough to run only ninety minutes on it.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017). Senua carries Dillion’s skull to Helheim, and Ninja Theory built the psychosis with binaural recording and a genuine collaboration with Professor Paul Fletcher at Cambridge and people with lived experience, funded in part by the Wellcome Trust. The voices in your head are voices in your headphones, positioned behind you, arguing about you. The combat is unremarkable. The audio design is a landmark, and it makes grief and illness the same weather system. Ninja Theory shipped it at a deliberately low price as an “independent AAA” experiment and published its own sales figures, which was a labour argument as much as a commercial one and is worth remembering when people claim this kind of game cannot pay for itself.

The ones that make a system out of mourning

Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus, 2020). You are Stella, ferrymaster, and the game is a cosy management sim — build workshops, plant crops, cook meals — attached to an obligation. Every passenger you befriend is a passenger you will eventually sail to the Everdoor and say goodbye to. The design’s genius is the friction between the two halves: the sim wants you to optimise routes and upgrade the boat, and the boat gets emptier each time you succeed. Thunder Lotus made an idle-hands loop into an argument about palliative care, and the passengers' last requests are specific enough to be uncomfortable. The hug button is the smallest and best thing in it: a dedicated input that does nothing mechanical whatsoever, available at all times, which is a designer stating outright that some verbs exist to be offered rather than used.

To the Moon (Freebird Games, 2011). Two doctors traverse a dying man’s memories backwards, planting a false life so he can die having had it. Kan Gao built it in RPG Maker, which means the entire emotional apparatus is tile art and a piano piece, and it landed anyway. The system is the point: you are literally editing a save file of a person, and the game asks whether a retroactive fix counts as a life. The medium’s favourite verb, applied to a man.

What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017). A house full of sealed bedrooms and a family curse, and each memory is its own game with its own controls. The cannery sequence — one hand cutting fish on a line, the other steering a fantasy that grows to fill the screen — is the finest twelve minutes here, because it makes dissociation a split-controller problem and lets you feel one half win. Each vignette dies with its mechanic, which is the tidiest structural rhyme in the genre.

Gris (Nomada Studio, 2018). Colour returns to a watercolour world in stages, and the platforming abilities you gain are shaped like coping: weight to resist the wind, a voice to break the stone. It is the most literal design on the list and the most beautiful to look at, and Berlinist’s score carries the parts where the metaphor gets thin. There are no fail states at all, which is a deliberate refusal of the medium’s whole apparatus of punishment.

The ones that argue with the genre

Shadow of the Colossus (Team Ico, 2005). Sixteen colossi, one dead girl, and a bargain with something in a temple. The boss rush is an elegy: Ueda’s team removed every enemy from the world except the ones you have to kill, so the landscape between the fights is silent, long and ridable, and the silence is where the grief sits. Each victory is scored like a funeral and shot like a crime. It is the definitive statement that a game can make you complete an objective and then make you regret it, using nothing but the framing. Ico had already found the hand-holding mechanic that taught Ueda’s team what a companion costs.

Silent Hill 2 (Team Silent, 2001). James goes to a town looking for a wife who has been dead three years. The fog and the guilt are one system, and the ending you receive is calculated in part from how you treated your own health bar and how long you spent near a particular photograph — the game grades your grief from your conduct, silently, for fifteen hours. Nothing since has had the nerve.

Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2013–2020). A magic-realist road trip about debt, dead industry and the people left standing in it. The mourning here is economic and collective — a state, a trade, a way of living — and the dialogue system lets you choose what a character remembers, which means you author the loss as you go. Seven years to ship five acts, and the delay became part of the text.

Nier: Automata (PlatinumGames, 2017). Yoko Taro spends three playthroughs establishing that your save file is a thing you have. The game needs all its endings, and the last one asks for the file back, in exchange for helping a stranger you will never meet. It is the only game that made mourning into a network service and the only one that made it work.

The one I cannot rank

That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016). Ryan and Amy Green made a game about their son Joel, who died at five, and released it. There is a sequence in a hospital room where you are asked to give the child a drink and the interaction fails, over and over, because it failed. Criticism has nothing useful to say about the craft of that. It is on the list because it exists and because the interactivity is doing something a memoir cannot, which is putting your hand on the thing and finding the thing will not move.

Where to start

Passage costs nothing and takes five minutes and will tell you within thirty seconds whether this list is for you. Shadow of the Colossus is the masterpiece and the remake is on modern hardware. Spiritfarer if you want thirty hours and a slow ache instead of a short sharp one.

What unites them is a refusal to let death be a reload. Each one takes a piece of the medium’s standard equipment — the save file, the control scheme, the difficulty curve, the completion percentage — and turns it into something that cannot be undone. That is the only honest way a game can say the thing, and twelve teams have now proved it can be done without a single speech about it.