Vidjama Gmaes Work

You’re a mortician.

A Mortician’s Tale is one of the latest games I checked out because I own somewhere in the realm of 3,000 titles on Itch.io from various charity bundles and I haven’t actually explored them yet. It’s a very emotional game, by which I mean you’ll experience being uncomfortable, sad, angry, and then relieved and happy all in the span of about 50 minutes.

You play as a relatively new mortician working in a mom and pop funeral home where each day is pretty much the same as the last. You’ll read your emails from a constant cast of characters, and get your instructions from the old lady running the place. Your friend from out of town emails you about her life daily, the hearse driver chats about his job and his growing frustrations, and you get a newsletter about funerals and death.

And then you prep the bodies. The game never expects you to commit any of this knowledge to heart, and instructs you every step along the way through the whole game. The game is educational to an extent, it takes you through the process of preparing a body for show albeit in a much simplified form. And that’s because A Mortician’s Tale isn’t about becoming good at being a mortician. It’s about the story and the characters, both living and dead, you’ll come across along the way.

Eventually your mom and pop funeral home comes into financial difficulty and gets sold to a big conglomerate of funeral homes. The new CEO rolls up and starts instituting all sorts of awful changes like forcing you (off-screen) to upsell customers on fancy caskets and preservation that they don’t need or want. You see the CEO in action in email bullshitting and guilting family members in mourning into buying fancy caskets and preservation procedures that the dead person definitely didn’t want. You’ll hear about family drama after death and all that fun stuff.

And when you’re done preparing the body, courtesy dictates you head right outside and pay your respects with a little bow at the casket/urn. You can be in and out without talking to the visitors but you can also hear what they have to say. It sounds like everything you might hear at a funeral. People talking about the dead, people talking about themselves, where they want to go to lunch, how cold it is at the funeral home, etc.

I think the most gut-wrenching moment was setting out an urn for a person who had no next of kin, and nobody showed up to the funeral. A Mortician’s Tale wants you to feel the feelings without feeling too much of the feelings. There is one part dealing with suicide, however the game warns you beforehand and gives you the option to skip it if it’s uncomfortable. The suicide itself is in story only, the body doesn’t show any markings that would suggest a violent death.

The cartoony aesthetic help make the themes of A Mortician’s Tale more palatable without making them less serious. It’ll throw you through a whirlwind of emotion during that hour of gameplay though.