There are some amazing new indie games that are coming out or have come out over the past month or so while the world has been hanging in isolated suspension. However, there is a game that was released on the 18th October 2017 that I think has some new relevance today; and that game is A Mortician’s Tale. You may have heard of it, especially if you are into smaller indie games as I am partial to. A Mortician’s Tale takes your hand and walks you through the life of a mortician working with her dead bodies and their families at the eventual funeral. The game takes a hard, honest look at death, and unfortunately during a worldwide pandemic this is something that many people must deal with all too closely. While most other games skip over death by just making the player take another go at the game with few consequences, A Mortician’s tale stares death right in the Y-incision.
Death in video games is often not thought very strongly through; or gives the player a misguided sense of what death means once gamers step back out into the real world. Or at least as far as we can step out during this lockdown. A Mortician’s Tale makes you ask questions about how death is treated today. It takes you through the embalming process and make-up of a dead body, and you might find yourself asking, ‘Why is it so important that the body looks alive and well before it is buried in the earth forever? Why am I sticking cotton balls into this dead person’s mouth just to make their faces look as though they are somehow alive again?’. Sometimes it’s a cremation job that you get in the game and these also provide lots of great and realistic insight into the process. Burning a body is not as easy as one might think. Just a tip. Then there are the moments at the funerals that make you ask yourself things like, ‘Why do families seem to fight with such selfishness when they need each other most? Is it right to ignore the dead person’s wishes to make the family happy? Are funerals for the dead at all, or are they for the ones left behind afterwards?’.
These are all very real questions, and although scary to think about, these are the questions we must face when looking at the overzealous death toll. A Mortician’s Tale, from developers Laundry Bear Games, say the game was inspired by author and actual mortician, Caitlin Doughty as well as The Order of the Good Death, her death acceptance organisation that advocates for embracing human mortality. Of course the concept of embracing yours and everyone you love’s eventual decay into death is not an easy task this organisation asks of you, but it is important to acknowledge the realness, the feeling, the texture of death as it brushes so close to us now. This game allows you to see death for what it is, instead of the commercialised faces of the dead and the glorious funerals that put on an analgesic show for those who are watching. A Mortician’s Tale is now more than ever in it’s lifetime a game that invites players into the murky world of death and makes one realise that when you die in the game, it’s very different from when you die in real life.
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