Gaming With Death

 

Warning: spoilers for Spiritfarer (2020, Thunder Lotus Games) and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (2025, Jump Over the Age).

In late 2021 and early 2022, I had a mild breakdown. It began a few days before I was scheduled to fly home with the unwelcome news that COVID cases were spiking again despite vaccinations. The spike in cases was not particularly new by this point in the pandemic (I had canceled a flight home in 2020 because it didn't feel safe for me personally or responsible in a public health context to do so), but I think that I had perhaps subconsciously hoped that the vaccination rollout would have changed something, anything, about the new reality we continue to find ourselves in.

My brain began spinning up the anxiety loom, weaving intricate tapestries of terrible futures that could befall me: I could catch COVID on the metro to the airport and die, I could catch COVID on the plane and die, I could catch COVID and bring it back to my family and we could all die. The focal point that this doom spiraled around was my clearly imminent death, followed by the simple question:

What will it feel like to die?

I was intensely stuck on this point. I had no frame of reference for what oblivion would feel like because it inherently can't feel like anything. Even the idea of drifting in an endless dark void presupposes that you will still exist to experience the crushing emptiness. It perhaps goes without saying that, though I wouldn't call myself an atheist, I have no strong faith in any particular afterlife. Even reincarnation, which at least entails the further existence of my abstract self, will necessitate the end of the specific entity that is my current subjective existence. The examination, consideration, and abandonment of each potentially comforting afterlife possibility occupied all my waking hours (which were ever so conveniently extended by semi-regular panic attacks that kept me awake far longer than I wanted to be).

Until I was able to start escitalopram (great value Lexapro for those not in the know) about a month into 2022, the miasma of this obsession hung over me, choking out much the light and keeping new life from growing. Even now, three years on, I sometimes feel the old specter loom and know that it is something that I will be battling for the rest of my life. The old me, ironically, is dead. Let us instead turn to the new one that struggles to be born.

Two games that have helped me process this are Spiritfarer, a 2020 cozy lifestyle sim from Thunder Lotus Games where you play the titular spiritfarer helping departed souls on their way to an afterlife, and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, the 2025 sequel from Jump Over the Age where you play a sleeper (an emulated human mind put in a robot body to work for the Essen-Arp corporation) on the run from your benefactor-turned-tyrant Laine.

Though vastly different in setting (dreamlike afterlife ocean vs scattered settlements in an asteroid belt) and tone (cozy chores vs cyberpunk dystopia), the games are shockingly similar in many ways. Take the main characters: amnesiac individuals who accumulate a varied cast of characters as they figure out what they want out of their second lease on (after)life. Or world structure: a slowly expanding map of settlements you visit many times as you run missions for both yourself and your shipmates. Or ending: the death of your character, at a time more or less of the player's choosing, that gives them a chance to move on to something new.

It is less the ending of these games that has helped me process my feelings about dying and more how they both help you get there. Both games have a sort of bell curve experience: an  introduction to the world that's pretty linear and introduces fundamental mechanics, a quite open middle that allows you to explore the world on your own terms (assisted by quests that point you to various points of interest), and a slow whittling down of gameplay until there's not much left to do but move on.

In Spiritfarer, this comes as you complete your shipmates' quests and bring them to the gate where they can move past this afterlife ocean to whatever is next. You build up the boat that you travel on over the game, adding livestock and agriculture modules as well as homes for your guests until you have a truly massive edifice that practically rivals any of the towns you can visit in the game, but when your last companion moves on you're left with an empty boat that feels all the emptier from the buildings you added to it. Similarly, the map that was so exciting at the beginning of the game with the unexplored spaces on it so full of potential is now all filled in, nothing left to discover. And this is good! This is how it should be. The whole game is about you helping these whimsical and troubled spirits make peace with their lives and themselves so that they can move on, and secretly the game has been walking you along the same path. Of course you could keep playing, keep fishing and growing flax and catching falling stars and traveling the same well-sailed sea routes...but don't you want to rest? Don't you want to try something new? And what could be more new than the place beyond this, the place where all of your friends have already gone? You've accomplished what you needed to here. Isn't that enough?

Citizen Sleeper 2, on the other hand, builds up to a grand confrontation with Laine on Darkside, the space station where his gang reigns supreme. His influence has been growing in you (literally) ever since he stopped your reboot at the beginning of the game, kicking off the whole chain of events that led to this moment, and this is the time where you can finally free yourself from him. And you do...but that's not the end. See, you were being rebooted to break your artificial body's dependence on stabilizer, a futuristic cocktail that counteracts the planned obsolescence Essen-Arp built into sleepers, and the incomplete reboot is starting to take its toll. You accumulate more permanent glitches, a game mechanic that expresses the fundamental decay your body is experiencing, and your companions warn you that if you don't complete the reboot you will die. But it was the reboot that created the amnesiac character so convenient for a player to step into (after all, if the character doesn't remember anything then it all has to be explained to them - and to the player). Are you willing to risk losing everything again? Everything you worked for, the relationships you forged, the life you made for yourself? What if it were all taken away from you a second time?

After the revelation that the reboot must be completed, you still have some time left. I used that in my playthrough to complete the last quests I had: creating an archive for the history- and tech-obsessed Juni, seeing the Greenbelt asteroid come alive with stepsilk I had retrieved, partying in the isolated colony of Olivera, dealing with a drive containing incriminating information about one of the corporations waging war in this system (the ultimate conclusion of which is probably the most disappointing things in the game). And when I was done with all that, I was left with basically nothing to do. I could do various odd jobs in the scattered settlements, but all the people I cared about had settled down and started moving on with their lives. The only way for me to move on with mine was to finish the reboot, but it was as I began returning to Darkside to do this final task that I realized that whether I survived it intact or not, my influence on the world and on the people who traveled with me would live on regardless. I might be different when I wake up, or the same, or I might not wake up at all, but the choices I made and things I did mattered.

Both these games lay out what I hope to have at the end of my life, whenever that comes: the feeling that my world map has been essentially picked clean and I'm ready to move on. I know that the real world doesn't work that way and that there will always be new things to do, new experiences to have, new people to meet, but these games have shown me that there is a beauty and a purpose in putting a character to rest and letting them move on to the next part of their story, even if it's somewhere that you can't follow.