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Awards
16th Place - 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2008)
Editorial Reviews
Baf's Guide

--Valentine Kopteltsev
SPAG
Grief is a very interesting replayable puzzle game, with several different endings, that will take multiple attempts to come to the conclusion. It's short, so you probably won't even have to save. The game play itself is solid, handling the number of scenarios well, though the implementation could be a little deeper, giving it a bit more verisimilitude.
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Member Reviews
| Average Rating: ![]() Number of Reviews: 4 Write a review |
Most Helpful Member Reviews

Repetition can be dark, claustrophobic, ominous, spirit-crushing. It can also be ridiculous. These functions aren't mutually exclusive -- just within IF, the repeated self-sabotage of Violet is both funny and heart-rendingly tragic -- but the emergence of one when you were meaning to just do the other is lethal. (Spoiler - click to show)Grief's portrayal of a paranoid, overprotective parent, becoming increasingly desperate to protect their child over multiple iterations, is meant to reflect agonising guilt; instead, as the parent's protective measures get stronger they seem more ridiculous, and as the child finds ever more arcane ways to die things drift into the realm of Edward Gorey or South Park. Serious tragedy is hard, and the structural idea is not inherently awful; perhaps with stronger prose and less generic characterisation it might have worked.
The other problem is that the subject matter, and to some extent the structure, draw inevitable comparisons with Photopia; intentional or not, that's a tough act to follow.

I played the game through once, and while I was surprised by the ending, I wasn't motivated to play it again -- nor did I have much hope that victory was achievable, given the name of the game. I suppose that's another way to play this game: just once, lose, and then reflect upon the nature of grief. However, even that method of playing is unsatisfactory, due to the just-the-facts-m'am style of prose. So what does Grief achieve? It manages to be decently coded, threadbare, and unmotivating.

Interaction is very minimal, which is a mercy for a game you have to replay but also means it's hard to get very invested in the story. I played through a few times and made different mistakes each time. But I'm not motivated to figure out the winning combination because to get hit with so many "random" tragedies just takes its toll.
Characters, setting, writing - I'd characterize everything as flat or bland. Everything has a kind of generic feel, there to serve a function that will inevitably turn on you. I couldn't even feel sorrow. If anything, the emotion I feel right now is frustration and even a little apathy. There's just no reason to care about the people and nothing particularly striking about the prose. I don't play games or read books for this kind of feeling. For tragedies to work, you have to get to know the people and like them, as well as caring about their plight. None of that here. Tragedy can be incredibly cathartic and beautiful, but it has to have heart, to speak to a person's emotion. There has to be just enough individuality in the character to make them real, as well as a plot with elements people have experience with. The subject matter was too narrow for me to relate to, and there was no other angle to view the plot from, no other sorrow that might have engendered pity or a sense of loss. This kind of game might have worked if the object was simply not to get killed, without trying to be sad, because the genre isn't served well by constant replays and short game length.
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Polls
The following polls include votes for Grief:Father-Son Relationships by matt w (Matt Weiner)
Going along with the Mother-Daughter poll, any games that touch on father-son relationships? Again, not necessarily the center of the work.
Fate vs Free Will Games by loocas
I imagine that the interactive nature of IF would allow themes of fate and free will to be used powerfully. Perhaps the PC is given a glimpse of his or her future and the player tries to avoid it. Are there games in which this is done?...
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