In Closer the Distance, my first inclination is to console Conny. She just lost her sister, Angie, to a tragic accident — a few hours after a nasty fight with her mother, Pia. At the same time that Pia was decrying her daughter’s terrible life decisions, Angie was taking her last breaths. All I can do is command teenage Conny to give her parents hugs, write in her journal, and spend time with her friends.
As the days after Angie’s death stretch onward — painfully slow at first, then so fast I’m anxious I won’t get everything done in the days before the funeral — I gain control of more of the small town of Yesterby’s 14 residents. I learn that Angie’s dad, Axel, sits for hours with his flock of sheep, avoiding the tensions at home. I try desperately to get Zek, Angie’s boyfriend, to open up to his father, who drinks too much. Stepping into first-person control of Galya — Pia’s best friend, and Yesterby’s only doctor — I go to work helping Pia with laundry and comforting her through the pain of sleepless nights.
Between the gameplay, I pause every few minutes to shed a few tears, weep a little, or text a loved one to tell them I love them. The game stays with me even when I’m not playing it; I’m still processing the death of my husband’s grandmother, who was like a second parent to him and another grandparent to me, and who passed earlier this summer.
Closer the Distance, developed by Osmotic Studios and published by Skybound Games, was released on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on Aug. 2. I dove right in — I love a life sim. I played incessantly for about a week, driven to keep playing by the upcoming deadline of sorts: Angie’s funeral. I genuinely wanted to help the town mourn and prepare to say goodbye, which is often the role I take in real life when death comes into my orbit.
The voice acting is wonderful, with characters like Conny (voiced by Coco Lefkow) portraying exhaustion and pain despite the game’s relatively short bursts of dialogue. The art style is washed in a muted tone that looks the way grief feels — things that should be bright and shiny are gray and dulled. The gameplay is most similar to The Sims, in which the player controls various characters at the same time. Players select locations or people for the characters to speak to, and once they arrive, they start activities like making dinner. Sometimes, your choices trigger cutscenes, which force the rest of the game to pause until you focus in on the characters in the cutscene. That keeps the timeline from getting too messy as you juggle a town full of grieving adults and children.
Each character — playable and non-playable — has a sort of dashboard that shows their needs and desires. Conny, for instance, craves connection. River, daughter of the town’s resident capitalist and Angie’s partner in a town revitalization project, desires to be perceived as helpful and intelligent. These dashboards point to a truth about death and grieving: every individual touched by someone’s passing needs different things in order to move on. Not all of those things are healthy. Angie’s boyfriend desires relaxation, and if you don’t command him to do something, he’ll sit on his couch and watch TV all day while his need for connection wanes.
Closer the Distance is beautifully written, spinning a story that is heartbreaking — but not gratuitously so. But I can’t bring myself to finish the game.
As I got several weeks into play, the feeling of grief conveyed by the game became tangibly real to me. Once Angie’s funeral was over, I didn’t know what else to do. I lost all motivation to keep processing her death, as it were, and the thought of keeping the town up and running felt exhausting. I’d learned so much about how important Angie was to the town — she was keeping River’s ambition in check so their town revitalization project didn’t become a gentrification project, for instance — and as I learned more about her impact, it felt less and less realistic to keep everyone healthy and happy.
I failed to keep Angie’s boyfriend from wanting to move out of town in a huff, depressed that there’s “nothing left” for him in Yesterby and enraged at his father’s alcoholism. I accidentally neglected Eli, the young brother of River who didn’t understand why all the adults in his life were so distraught. And in real life, I had a desire to move on, push the difficulty aside, and focus on things that wouldn’t constantly remind me of my grief.
Closer the Distance is so good at replicating grief that I couldn’t keep playing it. It’s taken me several weeks to praise its virtues, let alone continue the game itself, because its subject matter is so true to the life experience of grieving. And that’s not a bad thing — in fact, I think it’s one of the most impressive parts of the game, and one of the most profound. Because it’s a reminder that grief doesn’t happen in a line. I’ll likely return to the game to keep up with Yesterby in a few weeks, once I’ve further processed the deaths in my real life and in the game. It’ll likely keep teaching me things about how to support others in times of strife. I expect it to bring me to reflective, melancholy tears again, both as I play it and as it creeps up in my memory when grieving becomes a part of my day-to-day once again.
