High on Grief
(This is an expanded and changed version of the original review.)
Herodotus wrote, in The Histories 3.38, about how funerary customs differ from place to place:
The point that Herodotus is making is that everyone has their own customs, everyone believes their own customs to be the best, and that the wise man understands that there is no universal goodness of customs. Anyway, I was reminded of this passage by High on Grief, which starts from the amusing premise that Yancy the protagonist has baked brownies containing (a) weed, and (b) the ashes of their dead mother. Whom they hated with a passion. Eating the mother is an attempt at healing, an act of absurd vengeance, and the keeping of a promise made in youth to a friend while high on drugs. (Proving Bill Hicks right: “I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do.”)
It’s good that the game has a funny premise, since without it, it would have been rather grim. From what we hear, Yancy’s mother was an absolutely horrible parent, subjecting her child to years of psychological abuse. She seems to have had no redeeming features when it comes to the parent-child relationship. She had great relationships with other people, but the how and why of this is not explored in the game – the protagonist notices it, comments on it, and briefly discusses it with a friend, but the role it plays is to put the negative role of the mother as mother into even starker relief. High on Grief is not in the business of humanising the mother, or showing her as a complex and rounded character. It is in the business of eating her ashes.
While being high! That’s an aspect of the game that I did not mention in the original version of my review, but it is worth commenting on. Drugs turn out to have been an important escape route for Yancy in their youth; to get away from the abusive situation at home and all the stress that it put on them, they went to their friend Nekoni and smoked weed. Its almost as if the weed is in the brownies to counterbalance the ashes of the mother; to make sure that in eating, we incorporate her and escape from her at the same time. Perhaps that is exactly what grief is. We give that for which we grieve a place in our self, and by incorporating it, win back our freedom.
That the mother is not a complex and rounded character is perhaps to be expected, given the premise. Somewhat surprisingly, the same is true of Yancy. We never get much of a sense of who they are beyond the struggle with their mother. We do learn something. They’re agender, they are autistic, they went to college and found some amount of freedom there, they don’t want kids, they have a bunny, and most of their friends are on some kind of server but also available for phone chats. That’s something, but it’s not much for a game where we spend almost 100% of the time inside Yancy’s head while they are struggling with big emotions. The struggle remains somewhat abstract. It never, for instance, gets into specific memories of the mother. Perhaps this is part of the point that the game is making; that under circumstances like these, grief is abstract; that there is no room to bring in the specific. And perhaps it is for this very reason that we don’t have much of a sense of Yancy arriving at real self-understanding. There is not much healing going on here. Or maybe there is, and the game is just making the point that such healing takes a very long time, so that the short time period of the game’s fiction cannot show a measurable amount change. That would be fair. In fact, Yancy themselves is pretty explicit about it:
Getting closer to going to where you want to be is a minimal goal, falling short of getting closer to where you want to be. This is how tough the task is. Merely getting yourself turned into the right direction is already a victory.
The main gameplay loop is this: eat a brownie, think a negative thought, call a friend, be talked out of the negative thought to some extent. We repeat this until all pieces of the brownie have been eaten. There is something positive about the fact that the protagonist has a wide circle of friends they can call, and who are all willing to talk to them and give them advice. On the other hand, the protagonist doesn’t truly unburden themselves to their friends, and we often only learn from diary-like notes that the conversations have not been as helpful as they originally hoped. Yancy emphasises that they don’t dare tell anyone about the fact that they are eating the ashes of their mother, assuming that their friends, like the Greeks in the story of Herodotus, would be outraged.
These notes are curious. Some of them mention the fact that Yancy is in a game. A friend who is usually not very wise now give helpful advice, ‘like someone else was speaking in his place.’ Yancy wonders whether the game’s creator would reset them and erase their grief, and even comments on something that they said in an earlier version of the game but which has now been changed. Yancy and the Creator even seem to have had a conversation, perhaps many conversations. What to make of this? What is the relation between Yancy and the Creator? If the Creator is free to create, then Yancy has every right to be extremely angry with them*, for why did the Creator decide to give them such a traumatic childhood? But that’s not the vibe. Perhaps Yancy understands that they somehow stand in for the Creator; that the Creator had no choice but to use Yancy to express the burdens of their own heart. If so, they bear it without anger – an act of love at the heart of a strange fiction.
* I’m using ‘them’ as a neutral pronoun here because the Creator is not to be identified with the real author. I’m sure that Bez has had no conversations with Yancy.