Wednesday 7 November, 2018

The first funeral with the new company made me think about how the younger the dead the sadder the funeral was. The death of the elderly was a lot easier for people to accept. The emails feel more business and “big corporation” every time. We just got a contract to do funerals for the homeless. The lone urn sitting in the room felt very eerie and lonely. The next email saying that he convinced a family to go against their wishes and have the funeral their feels very wrong. In the same week your co-worker quits. It makes me wonder what my future holds at this company. The funeral itself carried the same impersonal feel that the emails do. The family seems unsatisfied and questioning themselves, while the others are making small talk about other things. You also get an email where the player learns that your best friend is bisexual. I think the game again does a very good job of not making this her character feature, but just part of who she is. This is the first game I’ve played that I think thoughtfully implements LGBT content in a way that isn’t tokenizing or over focusing on that character trait.
The game comes to a happy conclusion. You start your own practice, your friend is well off, and your old co-worker and boss are happy for you. In the end I really like our character despite getting no direct characterization. The feelings of others and the ways that they confide in you say a lot about yourself.

Great job! It sounds like you had a pretty good experience playing this game and you probably have some pretty good ideas of what to do for your OPA. If you don’t, however, here’s a couple thoughts that might spark that creative process for you. How do the desires of the dead compare to the desires of the living; that is, on the topic of the boy who wanted to be cremated, is it more important to respect the dead or the living when you can’t pick both? What kinds of things does the game do to respectfully address LGBT issues, and do you think the setting of a mortuary has any impact on that aspect of the game? For the funerals that were more impactful, what did the game do differently? What made them more impactful?