Closer The Distance Review - Grief Management Simulator

Closer the Distance is heartbreaking from the moment it begins. We hear a woman talking to her sister about the comfor🥃t it gives her to know that there’s always life going on around her, even when it has nothin𝄹g to do with her. Her voice is gentle, almost loving as she talks about the people in Yesterby, the small, remote town they live in.

As she speaks, we see Yesterby from above, slowly zooming in on a house as a police car drives up to it. We stop when we see a living room and a family, two parents and a daughter, rendered in beautiful, stylꦫised, low poly graphics. It feels as if you’re peeking into a playset where the dolls inside move on their own. The parents are annoyed, tired of waiting for their older daughter Angie to come home for dinner. They start bickering, but the argument is cut short when the doorbell rings. The mother answers the door, then returns and tells Angie’s sister, Conny, to go to her room. On her way up, Conny passes the front door. It’s the police.

You may have already guessed what’s happened – Angie has died in ꧙a car accident. But she’s not gone, not really. You direct Conny into Angie’s ro𒅌om, where she begins talking to her sister. A circle pops up, prompting you to click on Conny, and she jolts with surprise at the contact. You are Angie, and you can still speak to her.

After reliving a memory of the last time Conny saw you, you connect with your sister and can control her. You make her look at things around your room, piecing together where✅ you went and what you were doing. Eventually, your parents try to break the news to her. You assure her: they’re assuming the worst, because they can’t hear her, but you can. All you have to do is listen, and everything will be okay.

This opening sets the tone for the🐬 rest of the game. The slice-of-life sim has you controlling Conny, using her to help the town of Yes🌠terby deal with their grief over your death. As the game goes on, you will form more bonds with people who were close to you (starting with the town’s doctor, Galya) and be able to control them, too, adding layers of complexity.

As I said in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:my preview of the game, Closer the Distance’s base gameplay is very reminiscent of , ex෴cept it subs out the familiar sandbox approach for a very specific storyline. As you control a character, you can interact with other people, clicking on them and selecting one of a number of options that pop up over their head. The things you do and say to other people will affect the relationship they have with your character, which can then affect the way your story plays out.

I’m not very clear on how relationships or decisions affect the outcome of each individual storyline or the conversations you can unlock, but comparing my notes with our guide writer’s revealed there were many things I missed completely because of the choic𝔉es I made. Take that how you will.

You also have to fill your needs, which are listed in a sidebar when you select a character. For example, all charac𒆙ters need to eat and sleep, but every character also has unique needs – Conny thrives when she has routine, solitude, and harmony, which she fulfils by doing things like sewing and writing in her diary. Other characters may have different needs, like Galya, who prioritises health and needs to exercise regularly and eat well, or Angie’s boyfriend Zek, who needs to feel accomplished by completing difficult tasks and distract himself from the state of things with TV and music.

I loved 🦋that the game forces you to work to a character’s existing schedule. Galya rises early, while Zek is a night owl, and you can’t change that – each character’s personalitౠy and lifestyle is concretely reflected in their routines.

Each character also has their own wishes that are listed alongside their needs, and these will vary ✨depending on what’s happening in the game. For example, the day after Angie dies, Zek runs off to the lookout point to be alone. Angie tells Conny she should check on him, so that gets listed under her wishes. Clicking on it will zoom out on the map and highlight what actions Conny can take, and with who, to complete that task. In this case, there’s an illustration of Zek on the map, and you can click on it to choose to comfort him.

A screenshot of Closer The Distance showing how wishes are displayed.

Prioritising a character’s needs while also making time for the things they feel they should be doing is a diffi♔cult balancing ac🧔t, but it also beautifully externalises the struggle of grief – do you take care of yourself first, or do you try to take care of everybody else? Can you do both? What happens if you can’t pull it off?

Galya, in particular, is a self-sacrificing creature. Angie’s mother, Pia, is one of her closest friends, and I tried at every turn 𝕴to have her help Pia as much as she could. But Galya’s other relationships and her own needs began to fall to the wayside, and as Pia fel𓆏l deeper into her grief and her tasks got increasingly chaotic and desperate, I found myself having to make difficult choices for Galya. Would she sacrifice things important to her just to take care of those who were grieving? Or would she, for once, put herself first?

Yesterby feels extraordinarily autonomous – like Anꦕgie says in her opening monologue, life goes on. If you wanted to, you could follow a single character all day, observing their daily routine. The game also helpfully alerts you when important conversations are happening between characters so that you don’t miss them by pausing the game and indicating which character to zoom in on with an exclamation mark over their portrait on the bottom of the screen.

These conversations are the core of the narrative, because they’re dependent on the choices you, as Angie, push them to make – what you prioritise can𝕴 cause an argumentꦇ, mend a relationship, or uncover secrets that set more events in motion. They’re also fully, and excellently, voice acted. Every character feels distinct and different, and the conversations they have feel realistic and revealing.

Every Home Is Unique And Beautiful

Pay attention to each lovingly-detailed house and room. Every character’s living space says♑ so much about 🏅them.

Moving deftly between poeticness, rawness, and sweetness, Closer the Distance is utterly convincing in its depiction of grief in all its forms and how we cling to the people we’ve lost. Angie wants to help the people she loves most move on with their lives, but they don’t want to let go of their connection to her. I welled up more than a few times watching characters argue with themselves over what Angie would have wanted them to do, willing them though my screen to ask a more important question: what do they want?

Closer the Distance’s execution isn’t quite perfect. The cont🐼rols can take some getting used to, as voices muffle if you’re not looking directly at the speaker, and perfectly centering the camera on them so you can both see and hear them can be finicky. There are some issues with sound effects cutting off suddenly, conversations clashing or being drowned out, and characters occasionally clipping through each other.

Silhouettes of Angie and River on the boardwalk

The game’s systemic complexity causes other cracks to show. Characters might have very intimate conversations with each other while other people stand awkwardly in the room, waiting for their turn to speak. Taking c🐓onflicting actions within a specific task could lead to outcomes not being parsed correctly, leading to unfairly negative results. If there isn’t a scripted conversation for two characters to have, they won’t acknowledge each other.

To be fair to the developers, minor flaws feeling so immersion-breaking is indicative of the level of complexity Closer the Distance 🐻has achieved. Every character feels so real that being forced to remember they&rs🍒quo;re not is jarring.

Then there&𒉰rsquo;s Laul, the most frustrating part of the game. Laul, the character on the game’s key art, is a drifting musician who comes to Yesterby late in the game, looking for Angie as he’s found her camera on the road. After discovering that Angie is dead, he tries to be helpful by poking his nose into people’s business, offering assistance and pushing characters to explore different choices. In practice, this means he enters strangers’ homes to talk to them, making the death of a girl he didn’t know his sole focus. I was annoyed that he was there. Why would this town need an outsider to give them direction? Why is he being so intrusive?

It doesn&rsquo🐈;t help that Laul is bugged – he often has full conversations with characters, then introduces himself after as if the🅠y haven’t just spoken.

Laul also plays music in all of the game’s musical interludes, which is where Closer the Distance strays out of poignancy and into cheesiness. Laul performs different songs as different controllable characters relive their memories of Angie, and it feels gratuitous and cloying. The 𒐪game is otherwise spot on when it comes to tone, which makes Laul’s inclusion even more confusing.

There are other places where fat could have been trimmed – for example, Conny is a little neglected by the midpoint of the game as we focus on other cha🗹racters, and the tasks𒊎 she’s given feel extraneous and unimportant in comparison.

Despite its flaws, I’ve never played a game quite like Closer the Distance. It somehow successfully manages to turn the difficult process of managing a community’s grief into a playable game, prompting you to ask yourself difficult questions without being hamfisted with its themes. It tells a deeply moving and compelling story about what it means to take care of others, love those we’ve lost, and honour their memories in ways that respect them while making sure we keep in mind the people left behind. And it does all that while maintaining gameplay that never feels tiresome, ba𝔉lancing the repercussions of your actions in a realistic way,🥀 and making you really care about its characters. I’ll be thinking about this game for years to come.