A Mortician's Tale | Review | A game about meeting people and embalming their bodies.
26Death is a hell of subject to tackle, whether your medium is film, literature, and even video games. Now, to be fair, games have never shied away from this topic in particular: I imagine a lot of your first memories in video games might have involved smashing a Goomba flat, or stabbing a goblin with a shortsword. No, games are not afraid to throw in the blood and guts.
But it’s far more rare when games tackle this subject in a direct, straightforward sort of way. I think that’s the reason experiences like What Remains Of Edith Finch stick with us. Death isn’t an abstraction: it’s a very cold, and calculating reality that fascinates us almost as much as it creeps us out.
For that reason, I was excited by the idea of A Mortician’s Tale: a game where you aren’t killing outside forces: you’re preparing them and observing the living as they mourn. I can’t think of the last game that drew me in with such an interesting, morbid topic. And I can’t think of the last game that pulled the rug out from under me in such an unfocused, disappointing fashion.
A Mortician’s Tale was developed this year by Laundry Bear Games. It concerns you, a young woman named Charlotte, who is the newest addition to the Rose & Daughters Funeral Home. Every day you receive a new body with a new story. It’s your job to prepare the body, whether through embalming or cremation, and allow visitors to pay their last respects.
The gameplay itself feels a lot like other doctor-based games you may have played in the past, which makes sense, considering the subject matter. Click and drag with you scalpel to make incisions. Shave the body, clean it, and so forth. This makes sense, but I was put off a bit by the fact that the game never lets you do anything without explicitly telling you how to do it, no matter how many times you’ve made these actions before during the game. I initially thought that this was a tutorial section to the game, but it stayed throughout.
After the body is prepared, you attend the funeral and pay your respects. This is where the game was the most engaging, as it gives you the option to listen to the mourners as they speak in the sometimes strange, sometimes predictable way that mourners react. One of them is wracked with guilt over a recent argument that she and the deceased had. Another can’t get over how good the crab cakes at the service are. Anyone who’s ever been to a funeral or a wake has seen this cornucopia of reactions: tears, laughter, and nostalgia all come in equal parts. Hell, I’ve seen flirting at a funeral. There’s really no wrong way to mourn, apparently.
I think the best funeral service moment came after you cremate the body of a homeless man whose body was brought to you. When you open the door to attend the wake, there’s no one there to mourn him. It’s just you. And it’s heartbreaking.
These moments are very effectively done: Laundry Bear should be proud of them. And they are sorely needed in A Mortician’s Tale because there is next to nothing else to recommend it for. As I mentioned before, the gameplay holds your hand and guides you through each and every preparation, no matter how many times you’ve done it. Not that you can have done it very many times, as this game took a whooping half hour to finish. All in all, you can’t fail your job. No matter how long it takes you to click on those guides for your sewing needle, there’s never going to be a moment where you slip and stitch a dead body’s lips onto his nose and have to explain it to horrified family members.
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