From the notice of a friend, I was notified of a humble bundle for COVID-19. In the bundle had Hollow Knight, Undertale, Jackbox 2, Superhot and many other games. I decided to buy the bundle as I had never gotten a humble bundle before, and figured it was supporting a good cause. The second reason is that I had never played Hollow Knight nor Undertale and figured it would be a good opportunity to pick them up and add them into my collection. Now the senseable person might think that I would have started with one of the games I wanted right of the bat, but instead I was drawn to a game called A Mortcian’s Tale. Now out of the 30 games you might be wondering why such a small little indie game? Well I thought I was getting into a game that was completely different from what I ended up playing.
Before I move forward the game itself covers death, and more specifically the preparation of dead bodies. If this isn’t your cup of tea then I suggest moving onward to a different post. Also I will be spoiling the game so if you want to play the game, also move onward.
Anyway, when you load the game you get an initial message from the funeral home director. She welcomes you to the family. From there you can read other messages, or go to the message from the director. In the message she asks you to start preparation for a body. You are only given an automated response as the player, and must proceed onward with the preparations. For each type of ceremony (open casket, closed casket, or crematory) you will have different steps to take to prepare each body. Open casket I found overall being the most tedious as you have to preserve the body from rotting and show it off to the family members. The only time you are given a choice for an option is when the body you would have prepared died due to suicide. You can choose to either handle the body or prepare a different body. Other than that, you are given automated responses for everything else.
Once preparations are completed you then go out to visit family members and friends of the deceased. There you can either choose to ignore all of them, and only pay respects to the deceased, or choose to talk to the people. In my play through I choose to talk to everyone, as I wanted to see what people would say about the ceremony. Many comments were about how they missed the deceased. Other comments talked about how they didn’t like x or y in the venue.
As the game progresses, the funeral home is bought out by a large company. Your coworkers start to notice this shift and soon decide to leave the company. The comments of the funeral goers also change once the policies change over to the larger company. They try to upsell and include food during the ceremony so that “you won’t have to worry about a thing”. Eventually you leave the funeral home to start you home and do green burials.
For me, the thing I thought the most about while playing this game was mostly the death of my family members. More particularly I remember going to the funeral home to see my grandmother in the open casket. It brought back a nostalgia of wanting to go back to a past. A past where my family was alive. This game made me wonder how my family members went through this process themselves. I have experience being the mourning person but never experienced handling a dead body.
As we discussed in class, having nostalgia for a past you never experienced. For me, the past would be growing up with a grandmother and getting to see her during holidays. I lost her at a young age and never got to meet any of my other grandparents. As I grew up, I had and still do loan for a childhood experience of being able to visit my grandparents. But it is and experience I was only able to get for a short amount of time.
I have linked both the game on steam itself and the humble bundle. Note that the humble bundle only has a few days left before it goes away.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/578720/A_Morticians_Tale/
DMS 448 Spring 2020 