Some of us have lost someone close to us. Most of us have lost someone far too early. All of us have seen death, whether it took your mother, your cousin, or just your barber. Grieving is a prevailing theme in all fiction, because death is the most universally relatable concept in the world. However, it’s not often that the story itself is grieving. Closer the Distance takes every painful second, every instance of loss, every wistful stare at the empty chair in your kitchen, and makes you live it minute by agonizing minute.
In the small coastal town of Yesterby, a young woman named Angela does not come home one night. You hover over her home in a top down view, peering into the beautifully drawn low-poly home. Her younger sister Conny paces about her room, hearing Angela’s voice in her head: “I’m probably just out at the beach.” “No. You never go to the beach at night.” As Conny slowly reaches the same conclusion as you, the player, your heart sinks. When the cops show up, hats in hand, you already know. Mom, deep in shock, returns to cooking because she knows Angela will be hungry when she gets home. Dad stares silently out the window. Neither of them will meet Conny’s gaze. And here the hook reveals itself – you are already playing this game as Angela’s ghost.
Closer the Distance is a story about Angela. Although she is dead before the player ever sees her, we return as her ghost, trying to hold on. Angela does not want to slip away. She does not want to be forgotten. But most importantly, she does not want this town to fall apart because of her. Liked by all, loved by many, Angela was the beating heart of this tiny fishing town. Without her, she fears that everyone’s life will slide out of control. It’s not egotistical, either, it’s very much true. It’s what happens when so many people truly care about you, and then one day you are simply gone. Angela is able to contact Conny, to speak to her sister in her head, and together they vow to work to save this town from being consumed by grief.
As you play the game as Angela’s ghost, you don’t walk around the map yourself. Instead, you explore from a top down perspective, whether up in the sky or at street level, zooming around town to influence the thoughts of those who are willing to listen to attempt to direct them to the best path. In practicality, Closer the Distance is essentially a management game through the lens of a decision-making life sim. I would describe it as a meeting of Life is Strange and The Sims, where most of the gameplay comes from managing your villagers schedules to improve their emotional states and complete the tasks in their life that need doing.
I love the town of Yesterby, but one major complaint I have is that it doesn’t seem to be anywhere specific. My friend who played with me guessed we were in a small coastal town in Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, while I was thinking it was perhaps the Isle of Mann or one of the British Isles. Our confusion came from the fact that about half the voice actors have an Irish accent while the other half have American accents, and one character is British. It’s strange because even within the same families, a sister will be very Irish and her brother is American. It just seems like something they didn’t care about, but it consistently took me out of the game. This is supposed to be a town that no one ever comes to and no one ever leaves. I feel like I would have been a lot more transported if it were based on a real place.
The dialogue and prose of the eight hour story are written a little strangely; at first I was taken aback, wondering why the voice actors were using the strange lilting intonations. I saw in an old developer interview that the goal was to create the feeling of witnessing a stage play, and once I saw that it immediately clicked. Everything from the staging to the voice direction to the writing itself very much encapsulates the feeling of watching a play. Specifically, the works of the early 20th century playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams come to mind. After settling into that mindset, I had a good time enjoying the slight dramatization of it all. I must commend the voice actors for their excellent work, despite the erratic pattern of accents they used. Doug Cockle, who gamers certainly know as the voice of Geralt in The Witcher games, even plays a character and turns in a wonderfully wistful performance.
Over the days that will come to pass, Angela must try and manage the town’s affairs so as not to let them fall apart without her by whispering ideas to four people: Conny, her sister; River, her best friend; Zek, her boyfriend; and Galya, her doctor and mother’s best friend. There are a slew of other characters around town, and by moving around the easy to use UI you can see exactly what everyone’s short and long term goals and wants are. Perhaps you see that Pia, Angela’s mother, is lonely. Take control of Galya and send her over to comfort her. However, by doing that, you’re taking up valuable time with Galya that could be used to mend her fraying relationship with her girlfriend, Leigh. Fine, we’ll send Zek over to Leigh to keep her company. But we’ll have to sacrifice time he could spend looking for jobs in the city so he can leave Yesterby once and for all.
Jumping about between characters like this is smooth, and I very much enjoyed the conceit. Each character also has six stats that are constantly rising and falling based on their activities. This is actually one other issue I had with Closer the Distance, because each character has totally different stats. Maybe three or four people have hunger as a stat, and two people have occupation, and three people have entertainment; regardless, it became impossible to manage everyone’s stats having to remember so many of them. I think choosing six stat meters and keeping them consistent for every character would have worked much better. Some of them were also confusing in their meaning – someone might have low sadness, but the bar is red, so is that bad? I also encountered many instances in which events happened in the wrong order; Laul would ask River how he can help with the boat house, and then two hours later run into her and say “Oh I haven’t seen you before, I’m Laul, I just got to town.” In an indie game attempting to weave this complex a web of interactions over a small town, I think this is inevitably going to happen, so it didn’t bother me too much.
I really enjoyed the management part of the game, trying to balance the time left in the day and the time on events like finding Zek a job before the application closed or building the boat lodge model before the investor’s meeting. Yes, it got stressful. As an RTS/City Builder/Management game freak, I loved it. If you’re not into those kinds of games, you may get overwhelmed. At first I didn’t like that I couldn’t see how long it would take to complete a task, but over time I came to appreciate the reasoning. If I knew exactly how many hours each task for each character would take to perform, I’d be overwhelmed by choice paralysis. Take the plunge, commit, see what happens. There’s not much decision making – the story doesn’t seem to change much based on your choices and there aren’t many dialogue trees. While I enjoyed the gameplay, I feel that Closer the Distance is about two hours too long and really outstays its welcome.
Over the course of Closer the Distance I began crying at least five or six times. None of those times were because of what was happening to the characters in the game. There is a basic human mechanism by which we intake information where the gremlins in the back of our brains try to translate anything we see into “wow, that’s sad. Now what if that was me?” It’s not necessarily bad; it’s also how we empathize and shoulder some of the burden from our fellow humans in their worst hours. Just half an hour into Closer the Distance I shed tears, because when I was Angela’s age and my brother was Conny’s age, I almost died. Through a long history of severe medical issues I won’t get into here, I lived a lot of years after that haunted by the thought “what if I had died.” And here I spiraled, watching Conny sit in her bed motionless for hours, thinking of my own brother and how much of his life would have ended if I had. Not to mention the rest of my family.
Over and over, the slow decay of Yesterby hit me with visions of my high school friend who died in a senseless car accident. My withered grandma who died years ago, so weak she couldn’t speak, hundreds of thousands of miles from her home. My great aunt who helped raise us, taken at such a young age by breast cancer. I’ve been luckier than most in this regard. But Closer the Distance doesn’t stop here. People like Leigh and Laul, for example, who didn’t know Angela, still find themselves depressed, heartbroken, and lost because of the devastation a single death brings to a community. My high school friend’s mother dropping dead on their front lawn from an aneurysm, or when a member of my college improv group that I didn’t know very well hanged himself. Death sends shockwaves, and Closer the Distance understands how easily one person’s death can make everything crumble. It rebuilds, of course, eventually. But never quite the same.
If you have recently lost someone close to you, you will either love Closer the Distance dearly, or it may send you to a level of depression I cannot be held responsible for. It’s heavy, it’s real, and it is not friendly. Closer the Distance is agonizing. It’s a beautiful story, and I’m so glad I experienced it, but I would be lying if I said there weren’t times where I wondered what could possibly be the point of making something this depressing. My eyes are itchy, my chest is heavy, and I don’t feel any better or wiser than I did before I started. So with that warning, and please, please heed it, I recommend Closer the Distance to all who are in need of grieving.
Nirav reviewed Closer the Distance on PC with a review code.
