How to Say Goodbye is a narrative puzzle game by Florian Veltman & Baptiste Portefaix and published by ARTE Interactif. It is inspired by French authors of children’s literature, such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Maurice Sendak, and tells the story of a ghost who lingers, not ready to pass onto the next world.
Like its title implies, the story is about how to say goodbye to someone who has passed away. The game begins with the player being asked to insert information about someone who has recently passed, such as their name, pronouns, and their favorite food. I recently lost my cat of nineteen years and thought this would be a great exercise to work through my grief.
I was wrong.
Stage One: Denial
Before even clicking play, the music on the title screen made me grimace. It sounds like the TikTok effect of warbling voices. Nonetheless, I chalked it up to the designers wanting it to sound cute.
What should have been a cute experience instead gave way to challenging controls and a lackluster story.
The puzzles are simple. Get your character through the door. Sometimes you need a key for a locked door; other times, you need to get multiple characters side by side to open the door. Some areas require you to lower platforms with the weight of your character(s). The tricky part is that the tile is designed to move either horizontally or vertically.
That is, until it can’t process your finger and will stutter in place. It’s also challenging to see the tiles against the background in certain areas. Worse still is when you are trying to move horizontally, and the game moves the character vertically. There should have been a system of clarification. Maybe press once to select which way to go and then swipe in that direction.
Stage Two: Anger
There are sixteen chapters, and there is no saving system. If the game glitches or you close out of the game to return to it later, you must start from the beginning of the chapter. I had to restart chapter six because of a minor glitch on one of the tiles and chapter sixteen because I couldn’t click on the door to proceed. The game is only two or three hours long, but there should be a save system between each door.
But frustrating puzzles aside, the story was the biggest problem. Despite making a character who has died (by the way, stick to a human; it makes more sense) and even designing their Ghost, we do not play as them the entire game. No, we play as Tove, a mischievous little ghost who steals our mirror. After a few puzzles, our main Ghost is no more, and Tove must find them!
Stage Three: Bargaining
Tove lacks any reasonable motivation on wanting to find our Ghost. They had just met, and while our Ghost was kind enough to offer Tove to come to their house, there is no deep reason why Tove must find the Ghost.
We encounter Exupéry and Sendak. They eventually find peace in their afterlife and move on from being Ghosts. But other than their short dialogue, I felt no connection to them. Why do we need them to find Ghost? They’ve never met Ghost.
In the end, the “villain” is the Wizard, perhaps a loved one of Ghost, unable to process their grief. But who are they to Ghost? Is it us, the player, who has inserted the information in the beginning? Is it some other character who has a tie to Ghost?
Stage Four: Depression
I may be missing something, as I am not French. How to Say Goodbye is inspired by Tomi Ungerer, Tove Jansson, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Maurice Sendak. Characters are named after these authors. But not knowing what they wrote and why it was necessary or influential, I was stuck with shrugging my shoulders.
Sometimes, games are art and ask us to delve deeper into our experiences and psyche. What Remains of Edith Fitch, RiME, ICO, and Journey are four beautiful puzzle games that each explore grief, loss, acceptance, and the subtleties of the human condition. How to Say Goodbye did not lessen my grief or make me cry.
How to Say Goodbye did teach me how to say goodbye. By hitting delete as fast as I could.
How to Say Goodbye is available on Steam and the Switch for $12.99 and IOS and Google Play for $3.99.
