In Closer to the distanceMy first instinct is to comfort Conny. She has just lost her sister, Angie, to a tragic accident—just hours after a nasty fight with her mother, Pia. While Pia was condemning her daughter’s terrible life decisions, Angie was taking her last breath. All I can do is tell teenage Conny to hug her parents, write in her diary, and spend time with her friends.
As the days after Angie’s death drag on—at first painfully slowly, then so quickly that I worry I won’t get everything done in the days leading up to the funeral—I begin to gain a sense of control over the small town of Yesterby, population 14. I learn that Angie’s father, Axel, spends hours with his flock of sheep, trying to avoid the tensions at home. I try desperately to get Zek, Angie’s boyfriend, to open up to his drinking father. I step into the first-person position of Galya—Pia’s best friend and Yesterby’s only doctor—and head to work to help Pia with her laundry and comfort her through the pain of sleepless nights.
In between playing, I pause every few minutes to shed a few tears, cry a little, or text a loved one to say 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 away earlier this summer.
Closer to the distanceDeveloped by Osmotic Studios and published by Skybound Games, the game released on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on August 2. I dove right in—I love a life sim. I played nonstop for about a week, driven to keep playing because of a looming deadline: Angie’s funeral. I really wanted to help the town grieve and prepare for saying goodbye, which is often the role I take on in real life when death comes into my life.
The voice acting is excellent, with characters like Conny (voiced by Coco Lefkow) conveying exhaustion and pain despite the game’s relatively brief 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 dull. The gameplay feels most like The Sims, with the player controlling multiple characters at once. Players select locations or people for the characters to talk to, and once they arrive, they begin activities like making dinner. Occasionally, your choices will trigger cutscenes, forcing the rest of the game to pause until you focus on the characters in the cutscene. This keeps the timeline from becoming too cluttered as you juggle a town full of grieving adults and children.
Each character—playable and non-playable—has a dashboard of sorts that represents their needs and desires. Conny, for example, longs for connection. River, the daughter of the city’s capitalist and Angie’s partner in a city revitalization project, longs to be seen as helpful and intelligent. These dashboards point to a truth about death and grief: each individual affected by someone’s passing needs different things to move on. Not all of these things are healthy. Angie’s boyfriend longs for relaxation, and if you don’t tell him to do something, he’ll just sit on the couch and watch TV all day as his need for connection wanes.
Closer to the distance is beautifully written, and tells a story that is heartbreaking—but not gratuitous. But I can’t bring myself to finish the game.
As I got a few weeks into the game, the sense of sadness the game conveyed became palpably real to me. When Angie’s funeral was over, I didn’t know what else to do. I lost all motivation to continue processing her death, and the thought of keeping the city running felt exhausting. I had learned so much about how important Angie was to the city—she kept River’s ambitions in check, so their urban renewal project wouldn’t become a gentrification project, for example—and the more I learned about her impact, the less realistic it felt to keep everyone healthy and happy.
I couldn’t stop Angie’s boyfriend from angrily wanting to move away, depressed that there was “nothing left” for him in Yesterby and furious about his father’s alcoholism. I inadvertently neglected Eli, River’s younger brother who couldn’t understand why all the adults in his life were so upset. And in real life, I felt the need to move on, push the difficulties aside, and focus on things that wouldn’t constantly remind me of my sadness.
Closer to the distance is so good at emulating grief that I couldn’t stop playing it. It’s taken me weeks to even begin to extol its virtues, let alone continue to play the game itself, because its subject matter is so true to the real-life experience of grieving. And that’s no 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 row. I’ll probably pick it up again in a few weeks to catch up on Yesterby, once I’ve processed the deaths in my real life and in the game. It’ll probably continue to teach me things about how to support others in times of turmoil. I expect it will bring me to thoughtful, melancholic tears again, both when I play it and when it comes to mind as grieving becomes a part of my daily life again.