The Graveyard

“It’s More Like an Explorable Painting Than an Actual Game.”

“Stone flowers will suffice to keep me nice and warm.”
Steam banner image for The Graveyard.

For a time in the late aughts and early 2010s, the term “indie game” was something like a dirty word in some circles. Divorced from its literal meaning in simply describing games developed and published outside of the AAA system, it had briefly taken off as a dismissive derogative — a catch-all for any game that dared to deviate from the industry standard template, prioritize its story-telling over mechanics, or – god forbid – not incorporate combat into its gameplay loop. Truly, these were stupid times: An era in which we apparently had to re-litigate whether or not games are art (they are), where pixel graphics were considered as lazy (they’re not), and when some of us were seriously worried that the emerging trend of “walking simulators” threatened the very sanctity of the medium itself (they didn’t). Boy howdy, did folk ever like to toss that walking simulator label around — where any game that didn’t center around constantly shooting everything and everyone on screen was somehow seen as a “political statement.” These same detractors would then go off to play military shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield, where it’s well-established that politics clearly play no part in those IPs. If all this sounds too dumb to be true — like I’m just inventing a hypothetical person to get mad about here? Well, here’s the thing: That person used to be me, and I can confirm that I certainly wasn’t alone in my boneheaded beliefs.

Suffice it to say, but the public perception of indie games has largely changed for the better in the past decade. Things have more or less completely flipped around now to where the AAA publishers are now painted as the ones who threaten the sanctity of the medium (accurately so), and indie developers are seen as a sort of last bastion of hope for innovation in the field. Anyone who tries to argue that “games aren’t art” is now viewed as completely out of touch, retro throwback graphics are very much in vogue, and military shooters are now contemporaneously considered as the single-most tired premise for a game imaginable. I like to think that most of us “indie cynics” grew up, learned to see the industry for what it truly is, and came to accept that we were wrong to dismiss the efforts of such inspired creators — of folk whose passion for this digital business never wavered, even as they had to deal with assholes like us. And for those of us who didn’t evolve our thinking or adapt with the times… I guess they still mostly stick to Call of Duty and Battlefield, but they sure don’t seem happy about it.

But what of the so-called walking simulators? Has their reputation too changed for the positive with the passage of time? Well, for one thing; we’ve largely started referring to them as “environmental narrative games” now, which is a pretty good start. And there have certainly been a few titles to emerge from the scene that have gone on to receive acclaim from both critics and consumers alike; such as Firewatch, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, and What Remains of Edith Finch. But even bearing all that in mind, I think it’s fair to say the classification is still a ways away from mainstream acceptance — not yet quite ready to be perceived as a “real genre” unto itself: Largely passive gameplay experiences are still a tough sell for the average consumer, who have come to expect more engaging digital escapism for their hard-earned money. If I’m being honest with y’all, it’s still not a genre of game that I personally get all that much out of, either. Different strokes for different folks and all that. But maybe that’s just my old biases talking? Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate some of those titles I previously dismissed, now that I’m a bit more open to giving them a fair shake.

In the spirit of second chances and better understanding, we’re going to take a look at one of the most widely mocked games to ever bear the walking simulator label: 2008’s The Graveyard, developed and published by Belgian studio Tale of Tales. It’s a title whose intentions have perhaps been misunderstood by consumers for the past decade plus, and whose high concept premise I’ve seen written off as everything from “pointless” to “pretentious.” At the same time, it’s also a multiple award nominee, which has been cited as a direct source of inspiration for one of the top-grossing AAA games of 2009. And as if that duality wasn’t confusing enough, I also have to address the fact that its own developers don’t even like to describe it as a “game,” seeming to prefer the phrase “explorable painting.” Perhaps you’re already beginning to understand why some folk write it off as pretentious? In any event, we’ll be treating The Graveyard like any other game we’d cover on this website: Attempting to measure its merits, exploring its perceived faults, and seeking to understand how it all came to be in the first place. So button up your most somber ensemble and bring your finest flowers, as we prepare to visit an honest-to-god digital cemetery.

“That’s It. That’s the Core Game Design.”

“Maybe we mistook cyberspace for heaven.”
Photo of Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, borrowed from the Tale of Tales website.

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn were both relatively early proponents of digital art and the world wide web, and would ultimately meet and fall in love with each other through the power of the Internet. In the mid-to-late 90s, they had each created their own websites – Auriea’s Entropy8.com and Michaël’s Zuper.com – before discovering each other’s work, deciding to collaborate, and merging their pages in 1999 to create the clumsily-titled Entropy8Zuper.org. Though they had both emerged from different parts of the globe (Auriea being an Indianapolis-born American, and Michaël hailing from the Izegem province municipality in Belgium), they realized the similarities in their approaches to art, and determined to work together despite the barrier of distance — until a point in time that Auriea could move to Belgium and the two could cohabitate together [and eventually wed]. It’s important to note that they each had fairly substantial portfolios before transitioning into this collaborative phase of their careers, and that they had both been accomplished artists by their own individual rights; but that for the purposes of this article (and so as not to get bogged down in the intricacies of the ‘net.art’ scene), we’re going to have to largely brush over those histories, and just skip ahead to the part where the pair started making games together. If you want an idea of the sort of stuff they had produced prior to establishing Tale of Tales though, all those websites I mentioned are still up, acting sort of as portfolios for their earlier solo and collaborative works.

There is one piece they put out during their time as Entropy8Zuper though that does bear mentioning here: Their first-ever “interactive 3D” endeavor, titled Eden.Garden. Released in 2001, Eden.Garden was a browser-based application which allowed players to interact within a so-called digital Garden of Eden; in which Auriea and Michaël themselves play the roles of Adam and Eve, and whereupon entering in other websites’ URLs would generate machine-interpreted worlds, within which the characters would perform corresponding interpretive “dances” (actually a range of animations lifted from Quake III Arena). At the same time, the developers seem to describe the game as a “new kind of [web] browser” in and of itself, as well as declaring that they had “turned the browser into a God” (per copy on the Entropy8Zuper! website). Get ready for a at least a few more of those “God” comparisons as we get deeper into this article: Much of the duo’s early works were rooted in and named after biblical interpretations, and their interest in this subject undoubtedly persists into their later works. As a final odd note on Eden.Garden, it turns out that its original design intention had at one point been something markedly different: “At first we thought about making an interactive sex application where the user could manipulate our action figures and move them into poses of the Kama Sutra. But then there was the desire to do something with the Garden of Eden, an aspect of Genesis that we had forgotten when we were doing our [previous Bible-based projects].” Personally, I’m glad they ultimately decided against this initial idea, if only for the fact I don’t really feel like having to cover an explicit sex game at the moment — especially one where you instruct the game’s own developers on how you want them to do it.

After three years together spent continuing to produce their digital art and helping to develop websites for other patrons / companies, the pair eventually came to a realization: The world wide web was becoming more and more commercialized, to the point where they “didn’t feel our artistic work still worked within this new shopping mall-like environment.”^[1] Of course, this conclusion had conveniently been reached in the immediate wake of the “dot-com bubble” bursting in the dawn of the early aughts, likely having had a significant impact on the viability of their design business and the reach of their webpage-based art installations. And so, the decision was made: Auriea and Michaël would take up designing video games as their full-time focus, serving as a continuation of both their artistic and commercial pursuits. To this end, their studio Tale of Tales was founded in 2002; with the stated goals of “[making] video games for people who don’t play them yet (if only to show our friends what we found so interesting about games),” and offering an alternative to the “rather childish things that were squarely aimed at teenage boys.” The decision was made to establish the company within Michaël’s home country of Belgium (where Auriea now resided as well, having made the move in the year 2000), in order to take advantage of arts funding programs available at that time. This would enable them to cover a non-insignificant portion of their production costs, and allow them to create games that fell outside of the traditional constraints of being “commercially viable” — at least to an extent.

The name ‘Tale of Tales’ had been decided in order to reflect a repeated theme to be seen across their games: Their new re-interpretations of classic fables and mythology, in order to tell their own unique stories. This can be seen on display in their first project to enter development, ‘8’ (alternatively known as ‘The Book of 8’) — so named for its main character being a slumbering princess who visualizes herself in her dreamscape as a “deaf-mute” eight year-old girl, and for the eight princes who have attempted to wake her from half a millennium of sleep. In this Tale of Tales take on Sleeping Beauty, the princess is cursed by an evil fairy to die in her teenage years, but is “saved” by a [less powerful] good fairy who manages to transmogrify the curse into a peaceful one-hundred year sleep. Unfortunately, the attempts by the eight princes to wake her prematurely would only serve to corrupt the spell, and are thus responsible for her still not being able to wake from it centuries later. As such, the goal of the game is to help guide the eight year-old girl through a 250-room dream palace infested by a forest of “wicked branches” (representing the ill intent of the evil fairy), though evidently not through direct control over said character: She is described on the “Features” page of the game’s official website as “an autonomous entity with a will of her own,” who is merely “influenced by the style of the player and their environment.” Along the way, you’d both encounter the lingering spirits of the unsuccessful princes, begin to piece together the visage of the girl’s true physical form, and ultimately seek to wake her from the unending dream.

If that concept sounds grandiose and ambitious, it’s because it most certainly is — perhaps a bit too ambitious for the first-time studio responsible for attempting to materialize it. While the game was initially announced in 2002, its development would drag on until 2009, at which point Tale of Tales seemed to place it on an indefinite hiatus. In spite of promising showings and positive reception at industry events, including an “official selection” as part of IndieCade’s booth at E3 2007, Auriea and Michaël just couldn’t capitalize on any of that momentum in order to deliver a finished product. The impression that I get is that ambition and feature creep likely got in the way, and that whatever initial scope they may have pictured for it seemed to have been completely eclipsed by their ever-expanding creative vision. Being just a two-person team at that point – where Auriea involved herself in matters of art and asset production, while Michaël was primarily tasked with programming – it feels as though they had perhaps bitten off more than they could feasibly chew? Still, attempts later down the line to resurrect the project (with ‘The Book of 8’ as the new working title) with more development experience under their belt have all wound up fizzling out just the same, perhaps owing to a vision simply beyond their means as game designers. It’s honestly an intriguing game concept though, and I do genuinely hope they eventually manage to make something of it in time.

The year 2005 would see the first actual playable offerings from the studio released, as they managed to successfully deliver on a pair of titles. The first would be a total obscurity by the title Het Min en Meer Spel (translating to ‘The Less and More Game’), commissioned to accompany an album release by indie musicians Gerry De Mol and Eva De Roovere. While I would love to tell you all about it, it’s become a piece of lost media at this point — completely impossible to find so much as a single screenshot for online, let alone a playable version of the program. I’m left to theorize that it came paired as part of a physical media release for the album in question (correspondingly titled ‘Min en Meer’), and that considering the relative obscurity of even the album itself, it’s just not something that media archivists have even thought to preserve. It’s important to at least make a note of the game though, as it marks what appears to be the first fully-realized collaboration between Tale of Tales and De Mol (after he had been attached to compose for 8, which obviously never came to pass), who would later provide music to the studio for some of their future titles. Luckily, the other game Auriea and Michaël would release in 2005 would appear to be more substantive, and make a markedly larger impact on the Internet at large… which is to say, it at least made some form of impact, as compared to almost none at all.

The Endless Forest is an anomaly even in Tale of Tales’ already-eclectic portfolio: A multiplayer online game, in which players can create their own characters and interact within a shared world together. The catch – because of course there’s a catch – is that players are all made to inhabit the forms of deer-like creatures with unsettlingly human-esque faces, who are incapable of speech or other similarly linguistic forms of communication (be it through VoIP or text chat). Instead, you’re given a small suite of gestures and pictograms with which you can convey your thoughts and intentions, and let loose unto the titular forest. It’s also a game without any specific goals or a defined endgame, never mind combat or quest lines: Your only “objective” is to inhabit the world in whichever manner you see fit to, and to entertain yourself with the novel ways on offer for interacting with your fellow deer-folk. The only progression to speak of is to watch your fawn mature over the course of your first month’s playtime, and to eventually unlock the ability to cast spells on other players which can alter their appearances. This deliberate lack of traditional gameplay hooks / standard MMO hallmarks is presumably what compelled Tale of Tales to describe The Endless Forest as a “social screensaver,” demonstrating their hesitance [or perhaps reluctance] to simply define their releases as plain-old “video games.”

All that being said, Tale of Tales sure sunk a lot of time and effort into updating The Endless Forest; paying it a comparable level of post-launch support to some traditional studio MMOs, and delivering free expansions relatively consistently over the course of the following two years. Seeing as the game had initially been commissioned by Luxemburg’s ‘Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean,’ and that the version of the game initially released on September 12th, 2005 had already fulfilled their obligations; it’s almost surprising to see just how much more work Auriea and Michaël were willing to put into it, and for just how long they were willing to continue maintaining it — all without any expectation of return on their continued investments. As a matter of fact, the game is still available to this very day (thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign launched in 2016),^[2] with its servers still online and accommodating a small contingent of remaining players. As for those updates between 2005 and 2007, they largely consisted of adding new explorable areas – growing the size of the game world multiple times over, and hinting at a deeper lore – as well as audio and graphical updates that helped to keep the game somewhat contemporary. In addition, the team would add cosmetic items themed around holiday celebrations, and take community feedback into consideration when adding further content to the game.

But perhaps their most novel method of interacting with their audience was their ability to deliver “divine intervention” in-game — a feature they referred to as ‘Abiogenesis,’ which they would leverage in order to make changes to the game world and interact with active players in real-time. Some of you will remember The Matrix Online for implementing similar sorts of functionality, which the developers at Monolith (working as part of their ‘Live Events Team’) used to great effect in order to surprise players and make them feel as though the Machine overlords were altering the simulation before their very eyes. In the case of The Endless Forest though, I get the feeling the power may have gone to the developer’s heads a bit, as press releases and copy on the game’s website would include such potentially alarming verbiage as “We are god.” Granted, there is a clear tongue-in-cheek element to that declaration in this specific context, where they’re simply musing over their ability to intervene in the game and potentially “impact life in the forest dramatically.” But it still feels like there’s something of an underlying implication to it — an indication that the gods of this small world may have been vengeful ones? They certainly had reason to be, past a particular point.

Likely the defining moment of The Endless Forest came around the peak of its popularity in late 2007, as the game had managed to pass the 150,000 downloads mark with over 20,000 registered users to pair (while claiming “2,500 Unique players” had logged in during the month of October).^[3] Continuing support for the game had allowed Tale of Tales to gradually grow their audience, and endear themselves to a base of dedicated players who would continue to inhabit the world [as well as regularly post on the official forums]. But this relative popularity would also put them on the radar of a rather notorious collective: Something Awful’s ‘Goon Krew,’ who had a reputation at the time for coordinating trolling efforts (often crossing the line into straight-up harassment) against all manner of online communities. When it came to online multiplayer games in particular, a frontpage feature by the name of ‘MMO Roulette’ recorded efforts by goons to grief and disrupt these titles, as they attempted to provoke reactions from hapless players and render the games downright unplayable where they could. Now, before we go any further, let me go ahead and provide a bit of “full disclosure” here: I was once an active goon myself (having first registered an account in 2006), and took part in a handful of these sorts of raids. That being said, I missed out on helping to grief The Endless Forest when it had briefly been a target for the forums, though I no doubt would’ve found the results of their efforts to be hi-larious at the time. It’s like I said earlier, folks: I like to think I’ve grown up a bit in the decade-and-a-half since then.**

In any case: Goons at the time had reached the conclusion that The Endless Forest didn’t “actually qualify as a game” (which is fair play, considering Tale of Tales apparently didn’t like calling it one either), determined that the title had been “abandoned” / not been updated since 2005 (which was just patently untrue), and that the game’s community must’ve consisted entirely of furries — a point which was also untrue, but which was good enough false pretense for them to decide that “these people are absolutely crazy” and that “[their] actions are justified.”^[4] And so, they set about their work: Organizing a mass of goons to occupy the game, and repeatedly spam a function which allowed players to produce an audible “moo” sound while getting in the faces of other deer. While this would’ve probably amounted to just a minor nuisance if it came down to a lone troll endlessly wailing in some corner of the forest in the face of a single other player, the fact that they were able to organize dozens of goons at a time to bleat in unending unison was enough to seriously aggravate almost the entirety of The Endless Forest‘s playerbase. Attempts by players to cast “silence masks” on the offending griefers were evidently easily reversed, leaving the community no reprieve other than to ask Auriea and Michaël to directly intervene in the matter. Luckily, they were still listening to their community and actively maintaining the game, and began to implement a series of counter-measures.

First, the team added a cooldown system for quieting the sound effect over time (when used in rapid succession). But goons easily circumvented this by simply figuring out the optimal timing to avoid triggering the effect… Aaand that’s actually the only idea Auriea and Michaël had, evidently: I was totally lying when I said they had a “series” of “counter-measures” in plural. On the one hand, I can see them struggling with the idea of outright banning a large swath of players for simply engaging with an in-game mechanic — annoying and ill-intented as its usage here may have been. If you think about it, the situation that was unfolding could’ve almost been by design – them planting the possibility for a naturally-occurring challenge, which the community itself would have to band together to overcome – if not failing to consider for just how many trolls would be simultaneously converging on the game all at once in order to disrupt it. As such, the predicament now was that some of their most dedicated players were at risk of falling off the game — unwilling to cope with the stress and aggravation of the long-running, targeted campaign against them. And so, Tale of Tales decided they had no other choice but to take drastic action. Did they remove the noise from the game entirely? Did they ban the goons who were seen to have been exploiting the function? Nah: They actually decided to simply “end” the game entirely.

Yes, folks: Tale of Tales had been made to stare into the abyss, and they could not help but to blink. In a move that shocked both die-hard deer and detractors alike, Auriea and Michaël used their Abiogenesis powers to run a credits roll over the game that could be seen by all active players, concluding with a somber “The End” titlecard. With relatively minor effort, goons had managed to end The Endless Forest, putting quite the feather in their caps. By all appearances, Something Awful had won, and Tale of Tales had folded their hand in a fashion seemingly unfathomable to their own dedicated players. Granted, this play had evidently been intended as a feint: The game did not in fact “end,” and service would resume in seemingly short order. It had simply been an attempt by Tale of Tales to convince goons that they had accomplished their mission, in the hopes that they would move on from the game and leave their community be. And for what it’s worth, this ploy seemed to work, as the posting of a recap article to Something Awful’s frontpage declared victory and saw the Goon Krew collectively turn to focus their attention on the next game in line. But at the same time, this had to have been a move which alienated some of the game’s own long-time community — convinced them that Tale of Tales’ policy was to simply give in to pressure, and to not adequately discourage bad actors. Either way, it would prove a turning point for the small studio: A moment in time where they were confronted by criticism of their work by both cynics and supporters alike, and which would seem to negatively affect their outlook on the games industry in the years to follow.

Tale of Tales’ mission statement had always been to defy conventional game design, and to produce games that didn’t indulge in “the constant need to score points and defeat enemies,”^[5] or the compulsion to “feature stories about heroism and good versus evil.”^[6] In the pursuit of that, they naturally had to market themselves with a degree of anti-industry punk sensibility — going to great lengths to portray themselves as rebellious, and position their games as “unmarketable.” But with the public response to the Endless Forest debacle, it seemed to have triggered something in them to go even further with their “nongame” design philosophy — to produce titles which deviated even more sharply from the template of traditional game design. Not only that, but the tone and verbiage seen in describing their works would only continue to harshen, and walk an ever-narrowing line between “defiant” and “downright hostile.” Like, it’s one thing to paint yourself as indignant at the state of the games industry, and to appear as somewhat stand-offish in describing what sets your titles apart from the pack. But the extent to which Auriea and Michaël seemed to indulge in this angle could come across as especially dismissive of their larger audience, as if they truly believed that their output was too much for the average consumer to handle. I’d go so far as to argue that their “righteous outrage” often felt meticulously manufactured, as they continued to refer to themselves as Gods (even outside of The Endless Forest) and bemoan how far the whole of the medium had fallen by their evidently enlightened measure.

Perhaps in wanting to embrace this new look for themselves, they decided that their next project should embrace a record-low minimum on meaningful player input — to challenge their audience in a fashion they previously might not have? If we’re being responsible in conveying the actual sequence of events here though, designs for what would become The Graveyard had actually begun almost immediately after the initial release of The Endless Forest — long before their run-in with the goons or any potential friction with their audience. That being said, a game’s design is an ever-evolving thing, so perhaps certain calls were made in the wake of that whole previous fiasco. I’ll note that we do actually have the benefit of a full “post-mortem” on the development of The Graveyard which I’ll be using as frequent reference from this point forward, although it doesn’t always provide key dates and chronology for how the title took shape over the course of its nearly three year-long development. Of course, the fact that it took Tale of Tales so long to produce something that’s ultimately so brief in its playtime shouldn’t be taken as them devoting themselves entirely to just that one project: Development of The Graveyard would run concurrent for a time with another title of theirs in development, The Path, which represented a far more substantial undertaking / substantive end product.

“Perhaps we have made some new kind of landscape painting?”
Concept art for The Graveyard.

Where a game like 8 potentially represented feature creep and overly-ambitious getting in the way of delivering a final product, The Graveyard began with the intention of delivering on a basic-most premise, with little in the way of extraneous features or frills. What’s more surprising is the fact that along the way, the duo would only continue to trim and refine their original pitch, to the point where the final product is about as streamlined as is imaginable. (We’ll address some of the specifics of that cut content when it comes time for the review portion of the article.) What managed to remain intact throughout these design iterations was just the very core of their original concept: “Your avatar is an old lady who walks through a peaceful graveyard (soundscape à la Endless Forest). That’s it. That’s the core game design.”^[6b] That’s a full quotation, by the way: I didn’t add that self-referential last bit where they say “that’s it” — as if even they’re astonished by the simplicity of their own premise. Clearly, the goal here was to deliver a product that they believed would be so antithetical to traditional game design, that consumers would have to stop and question everything they thought they knew about what video games could constitute… or something like that, I’m guessing? Of course, this comes before we even begin to address the actual thematic content within the game, which clearly intends to confront players’ perceptions and feelings on the subject of death and mortality. (But again: We’ll dive deeper into that when it comes time to properly review the game.)

To hear Auriea and Michaël describe their own intention; they first describe their belief that the games industry has already transcended the boundaries of “traditional games,” while simultaneously contending that the studio system is still too afraid to deviate any further from established convention: “They don’t realize that the most interesting aspect of their design is the way in which they express the story: through the environment, the animations, the colour, the lighting, etc. […] Compared to this amazing new quality, ancient game structures seem rigid and out of place. But we feel that the commercial success of the games industry is holding the medium back from evolving into a true artistic medium.”^[6c] They further describe traditional game structure as limiting mainstream games to “the confines of triviality, of toys” — holding them back from exploring the full potential of the medium as they saw it. I’d of course argue that dismissing the larger industry as a whole was pretty closed-minded of them, and to pretend as though developers were somehow oblivious to their ability to tell stories outside of direct narrative is a decidedly unfair portrayal. In any case, Tale of Tales envisioned The Graveyard as being a title that would directly challenge their [perceived] notions of where the field was failing; by “exploiting the medium’s capacity of immersion and simulation to tell its story,” and by “focusing on the experience of being more than on seeing.” They hoped that players would be able to shift their approach to “playing a part” rather than “playing a game,” and that users would find satisfaction in performing something akin to a theatrical role rather than seeking the so-called “sportive challenge” that came packaged with more traditional games.

As for the self-imposed streamlining and shortening of the game concept, there’s a brief bit in the post-mortem where the duo weigh the idea that their original vision for the title – with all its initially envisioned features intact – may have distracted from the core of what they were attempting to convey: “Does the gameplay described in the original version really add to the emotional impact of the game? Doesn’t it, on the contrary, reduce the impact: perhaps giving players something to do, creates a layer of protection against the emotional impact?”^[6d] This would serve certainly as one explanation for their whittling down of the design to its bare essentials. But later in the same text, they proceed to potentially contradict themselves, in also going on to describe the game’s brevity as something like a tactical move — a conceit made in the interest of better ensuring funding for the game’s development. By the duo’s measure, “Smaller projects with lower budgets make a better chance at being accepted,” at least when it came to who they would be pitching it to: A Belgian arts funding body in the ‘Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds’ — translating to English as the ‘Flanders Audiovisual Fund’ (but which is more commonly just abbreviated as “VAF”). Apparently established with the mission of preventing the Flanders region of Belgium from being “flooded by alien culture” (at least, according to Michaël), the foundation primarily focused on bolstering Flemish film production; though they would eventually expand their purview and funding to video games as well, albeit less committedly and consistently. As such, Tale of Tales were apparently just as likely to see their pitches rejected as they would be accepted, leading them to either alter or abandon given projects.

In the case of The Graveyard, it was apparently approved on its first submission (covering €15,000 of the game’s estimated €18,000 budget),^[6e] but not without a few votes cast against it. In Auriea and Michaël highlighting comments attached to the project’s approval, you get a sense that the VAF had concerns about how players might receive the game: “The members of the commission also differ in opinion about the public reception of the piece. Part of the commission is afraid that the discrepancy between concept and experience will be too great, causing frustration with the players.” But one comment in particular stands out as a particularly prescient observation on the very nature of Tale of Tales’ games, and as reflection of a sentiment that many consumers themselves would soon come to share: “One member considers the project to be more of a parody on Tale of Tales’ own work than on the games industry or game aesthetics.” This is an especially telling statement from the VAF, as it demonstrates that even this early in Tale of Tales’ operating history – with just two published titles under their belt – there was already a sentiment that the studio’s game concepts bordered on self-parody! When that opinion comes from no less than an arts funding committee – a body who undoubtedly had to sift through hundreds of potentially pretentious pitches in the course of a given month – it should truly speak to just how “out there” Tale of Tales’ submission must’ve been for them to respond in such a blunt way — even as they did ultimately approve its funding.

“In the beginning, The Graveyard was in colour.”
Prototype screenshot of The Graveyard.

With the matter of funding squared away, Auriea and Michaël began work on the title proper, but with a notable change to their workflow: The Graveyard would represent the first game of theirs to be developed in the popular ‘Unity’ development environment, rather than their traditional choice in the ‘Quest3D’ engine. As a matter of interesting curio, Quest3D wasn’t originally intended as a game development engine, and was more meant to serve as a tool for visualizing architectural design. In fact, the company’s initial response to Tale of Tales’ inquiries regarding licensing it for game development was – to quote Auriea’s recollection – “Please don’t make games with it.”^[7] Naturally, the developers would ignore that plea in order to develop much of their early software, despite the fact that Quest3D really wasn’t well-equipped for the job — that it was a rather cumbersome and poorly optimized engine when it came to game performance, and packed to the brim with technical eccentricities that would frustrate end users (such as screen resolution options never actually matching their indicated sizes). This could perhaps explain in part the team’s wanting to give Unity a shot, with an additional factor being the want to publish games cross-platform across Windows and Mac — something Quest3D couldn’t manage. In any event, this meant that The Graveyard would serve as an experiment in the studio’s testing out a new engine… an evaluation which would also be released through a commercial model for their first time ever, making it a sort of dual-purpose experiment at that. So, not only would consumers get to experience an already-inexperienced developer’s first-time attempt at testing out an unfamiliar and challenging set of tools (“[Unity’s] script-based programming is often too much to wrap our art-heads around”^[6f]), but they’d now have the privilege of [potentially] having to pay to experience this first-time effort as well!

Tale of Tales would inevitably draw criticism for choosing to monetize something so apparently experimental and ultimately quite brief. But as I’ve said time and time again on this site: The “time-value proposition” isn’t something I necessarily subscribe to, and the prices typical consumers generally deem “appropriate” for games can often be completely out of whack with how much effort and how many hours actually goes into producing them. Of course – in this instance – Tale of Tales did have a significant portion of their budget subsidized, and turnaround on actually developing the game would only wind up taking them two months. That said, the €15,000 they had to work with isn’t exactly a lavish budget for a video game (roughly $16,500 USD), and the money wasn’t just being split between Auriea and Michaël either: Their allotment also had to account for paying three additional contributors; including their regular composer (Gerry De Mol), an animator (Laura Raines Smith), and an additional sound designer (Kris Force). Bearing all that in mind, I’m sure that Auriea and Michaël could’ve wound up paying a bit more out of pocket than they may have originally projected, and probably would’ve appreciated a chance to at least break even on the whole endeavor. Perhaps this doesn’t fully excuse the particularly egregious nature of their “unique” pricing model (more on that later), but it can certainly help in understanding why they may have felt compelled to test those waters. Of course, Tale of Tales themselves would never admit to any of this, preferring to claim that the concept of “selling the game” was no more than “a part of the artistic concept, not an attempt to make money.”^[6g] Sure, whatever, let’s just roll with it for now.

The Graveyard would ultimately be completed on schedule — “on time to be released on Good Friday” (March 23rd, 2008), playing into the fact that Tale of Tales “liked playing with religious traditions.”^[6h] Before they pulled the trigger on launching it though, they would send a preview of the game to several of their friends within the industry, in order to get some early feedback on it. And it was at this point that the duo would wind up running into some perhaps unexpected scrutiny: What they would quickly discover is that the people they had consulted – who were described as “used to playing games” (as opposed to folk purely rooted in the arthouse scene, I suppose) – evidently didn’t appreciate the fact that the software “only generated questions and did not supply any answers. […] The response was mixed, to say the least.” Of course, this would do little to dissuade or delay The Graveyard’s release on its intended date; with the game initially being offered exclusively through Tale of Tales’ own website. (It would release on Steam nearly a year later on March 9th, 2009; before additionally coming to Apple’s App Store on March 8th, 2010.) As part of their distribution model, curious consumers would be able to download a ‘Trial’ edition of the title, which – as Tale of Tales would surprisingly admit to – was actually “exactly the same” as the game’s ‘Full’ version. True to their word, the two versions of the game really were identical in terms of content — with the trial gating off nothing in the way of in-game content. There was just one key difference between the two versions: A $4.99 price tag attached to the full version [on PC] would unlock a singular feature, acting as a sort of “opt-in” for a potentially shocking modifier. Users would have to decide whether or not to experience “the possibility of death.”

** To be clear here, it’s not that I consider myself “above” participating in the occasional bit of online griefing — primarily to put asshole teammates on tilt. But the ways in which the old Something Awful escalated their in-game antics to out-of-game harassment just don’t sit well with me, as their justifications were rarely more than prejudice against communities they deemed “weird” in mostly inoffensive ways. Seeing them dismiss The Endless Forest as unworthy of anyone’s time and condemning the playerbase for the sin of being furry-adjacent is just mean-spirited in a way that isn’t especially funny to me anymore. All that being said: I’d be lying if I said that the act [on its own] of just constantly mooing to the point of driving Tale of Tales to run an in-game credits roll doesn’t still get a chuckle out of me.

“Every Time You Play She May Die.”

Level design / cemetery layout plan for
The Graveyard.

Here’s the part of the article where I would usually provide a plot synopsis for the game in question; after extrapolating from in-game cutscenes, its instruction manual, and whatever other scraps of outside information might help inform it. But in the case of The Graveyard, there’s really precious little to be said other than what appears in the game’s own succinct, single paragraph of exposition provided on its original store page: “The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. You play an old woman who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words.” At first glance, that seems like a fairly accurate and concise description of your “mission” in the game (should you choose to accept it). Believe it or not, it also covers the sum of available mechanics as well; between the walking, the sitting, and the song-listening. Really, it kind of does my whole job for me: There’s not too much else I can add to my breakdown here, when everything within The Graveyard comes exactly as it is written on the proverbial tin.

… Except, that description isn’t entirely accurate, for as concise and focused as it may seemingly be. Most pertinently, The Graveyard doesn’t go all the way with its promise of going “without words;” as there are clear text prompts used in-game to describe the controls and intention of the game, as well as labeled buttons that can be pressed in order to restart and resume it. Not only that, but the game only goes and centers itself almost entirely around the experience of listening to a song [composed by De Mol], which so happens to come complete with Flemish-language lyrics — something I, for one, would certainly count as “words” (and which also behooved Tale of Tales to include full on-screen English-language subtitles to accompany it for its global release, as an added linguistic component). More on that musical number later, but perhaps you can already begin to see how referring to the game as some sort of wordless experience is a bit misleading? The other point of contention I feel compelled to raise is that “explorable painting” description, which is certainly subjective in its quantification, but which I disagree with the labeling of The Graveyard as nonetheless. And I reckon that largely comes down to my own personal opinion — that the extremely limited level of “exploration” on offer here hardly qualifies, and that its qualifications as a “painting” are somewhat dubious at best. Again, I’m talking about a purely subjective and personal opinion here, but one which I’ll do my best to try and argue for as pointed criticism nonetheless.

But first, a description of what the gameplay actually entails: As has been established, you play as an elderly woman, complete with a walking cane to aid her impaired mobility. For whatever it’s worth, I can’t think of many other video games daring enough to cast players as a senior citizen, let alone a geriatric female? Not since Bionic Granny on the Commodore 64 has a developer defied the standard protagonist convention in such a bold way. It should be noted that The Graveyard‘s playable character does take inspiration from Michaël’s own grandmother — an at-the-time 98 year old woman who “talks about death every time [they] meet her.”^[6i] At the same time, they didn’t intend to base the player character entirely on her, as they recognized that “the avatar needed to be more of an archetype than an actual person — so that the player can project their own experiences into the game.” It’d also be pretty morbid (if not downright tasteless) to base the character directly on a real-life person, considering what can potentially happen to them over the course of the game. In any case, putting yourself in her loafers requires coming to grips with her slow walk speed, and understanding that attempting to wander off the game’s intended path is an exercise doomed to end in drawn-out disappointment. Still, you’re free to turn her in any which direction you choose, and to even walk backwards [at an even more cautious pace].

Ultimately though, you’ll probably just want to walk forward in as straight a line as is possible, and make your way to your intended destination as promptly as you can — to get the old lady to the bench, where she will eventually decide of her own volition to sit down. There’s no button prompts here, after all. This is where the game takes a break from all that excitement, and gives you a chance to recuperate from the high-octane action. Sitting down at the bench will eventually prompt a song to begin playing: Gerry De Mol’s “Komen te gaan,” composed specifically for The Graveyard. With its three minute and fifty second runtime, the intention is for players to remain seated for the duration of it, and to deeply contemplate the lyrics being sung to them, all while treated to the accompanying near-static visage of the old lady sitting on the bench. A portrait-in-portrait close-up on her face will eventually fade in on the right-hand side of the screen, though the woman never reacts to or starts humming along to the song in question: She simply cycles through a small handful of unrelated idle animations, for as long as you leave her sitting there. Eventually, the song ends – much as life itself eventually does for all of us – and you can choose to either continue sitting indefinitely or get up in order to begin the long trek back to the cemetery gate; at the threshold of which the screen will fade to black, before prompting you to either restart or quit the game. All told, the experience in full should run you roughly six minutes time, if you place a minimum on dilly-dallying.

It’s at this point that some of you might be asking yourselves, “Is that really all there is to it?” Well, I suppose there are at least a couple of alternative ways you can invent to interact with the game: If you should so choose, you can actually walk back through the cemetery gates at the very start of the game, and skip the song (as well as most of the walking) entirely! This’ll give you roughly five seconds worth of total playthrough time for your lack of patience. The alternative, then, is to prolong the experience for as long as possible; by either wandering off the path, interrupting the song by getting up in the middle of it, or choosing to re-listen to it repeatedly by standing up and sitting back down when it’s done. But none of these approaches are particularly satisfying from an “entertainment” perspective, and you can only experiment with this limited kit for so long before you’ve exhausted yourself and the range of content on offer. Auriea and Michaël clearly had a very specific way they wanted players to engage with their art piece, which… you know, actually kind of strikes me as odd, seeing as I’ve always envisioned “art” as something that should be viewed and interpreted through whatever lens the viewer decides to personally apply to it? In my mind, an “explorable painting” should actually let a player go off and explore the world of the painting (novel concept, I know), rather than placing invisible walls around its borders and ultimately forcing the viewer down a deliberately narrowed track. Let me walk off the canvas entirely and into an empty white void, if that’s all that lies beyond!

It’s here where I’ll run down some of the features that were ultimately cut from The Graveyard, as detailed in its post-mortem: An intention to write text on all the tombstones would’ve likely presented epitaphs for all the graveyard’s permanent residents. Feeding birds would’ve presumably been presented as a button prompt while sitting on the bench, allowing you to engage in something passively interactive while listening to the song play. Perhaps most interestingly, there was originally an idea to have the elderly woman have to seek out her deceased husband’s grave; where its location would be randomized on every playthrough, as well as her reaction in the moment of finding it — whether it be smiling, crying, talking, or whatever other emotions Tale of Tales could’ve thought to include. A similar design concept would’ve seen different events playing out on the bench every time the player sat down at it, where an idea for the game to have been broken up into different “chapters” potentially implies an envisioned escalation of scripted scenes that’d play out over the course of in-game days or years. All of these are fine ideas, by my measure, and would’ve done a lot to make the game feel more like a proper interactive art installation — something to elevate your role as player from mere “spectator” to full-fledged “participant” in a way that the final product doesn’t really leverage.

Now, something I rarely do in my reviews is go into too much depth in describing a given game’s graphics. In the case of most titles, I generally don’t like to raise too many criticisms of how they might choose to stylize or otherwise present themselves, so long as the visuals are easy enough to parse and not entirely offensive to the eyes (flashing lights, overly-repetitive texturing, confusing interfaces, et cetera). For me, I honestly don’t mind if a game has to cut corners here and there in terms of animation or texture detail or whatever else, so long as there’s at least a cohesive and consistent vision in mind for what the artists hoped to convey. And to be clear, it’s not that The Graveyard isn’t particularly appalling to look at: Laura Raines Smith’s subtle animations for the elderly woman really do capture the passage of time on the human body, and the interpretation of a real-life cemetery (the Izegem cemetery in Belgium) is depicted quite nicely through its use of texture and naturalistic lighting. The oddly shimmering 2D trees can honestly be a bit distracting, but everything else largely comes together to place you within the location (including Kris Force’s understated soundscape). As such, my contention here is simply the fact that Auriea and Michaël seem so insistent on calling the game a “painting,” without actually leaning into any sort of perceptible painterly style? If anything, it’s closest to a sort of photorealism; which is of course a style of painting itself, but not exactly what comes to mind for me when I think about inhabiting a “painted world.” And then there’s the fact that the game is rendered in black and white — which, again, is not entirely unheard of in paintings. But hearing Tale of Tales’ own reasoning for what seems to have come as a late-stage decision doesn’t exactly inspire appreciation for their motivation:

“In the beginning, The Graveyard was in colour. But when we were playing with post-process shaders in Unity (we really like post-processing images in real time! 🙂 ), we fell in love with the black and white style. Probably because of watching too much Godard and Bergman movies…” ~ Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales^[6j]

In decoding that admission, we can discover The Graveyard‘s original assets were all rendered in full color, which can even be seen demonstrated in some of their early prototypes for the game. The decision then to switch to grayscale comes across here as completely impulsive — unmotivated by any deeper meaning or purpose, other than to potentially homage a pair of avant-garde film directors (only two of the most popular / accessible in film’s history, at that) in the most surface-level way imaginable. It’d be one thing if the game had always been envisioned as being in black and white, and meant to speak to some facet of the bleakness or binary state of life and death. But in reading further, we’ll find that’s almost entirely the opposite of the duo’s outlook on that subject matter, and that the finalized color scheme is almost at odds with their apparent intention: A want to shine a light on the potential beauty of death, and the comfort that may come with embracing and accepting it. Shouldn’t that call for a color scheme far less “dark and somber” — less stark in its conveyance, and “inspiring a broader mix of emotions?” By the way, those criticisms in quotation marks are no less than Tale of Tales’ exact words in providing a note to their composer Gerry, who had to be explicitly told to “lighten up” after an earlier arrangement of his song (which you can listen to a provided “fragment” of here) apparently didn’t fit with Auriea and Michaël’s vision.^[6k] On that note, it’s high time we started decoding the song itself.

The title “Komen ta gaan” translates to something like “come to go” in English — “a quite regional euphemism for dying, means as much as ‘arriving to the departure.’”^[6l] With this in mind, the lyrics first detail the deaths of five individuals: A forty-year old German woman (‘Irma’) who appears to have succumbed to consumption, ‘Renée‘ who expires due to fibroids, an ‘Auntie Mo’ who passes in their sleep, a stillborn infant named ‘Emma’ (who it is made a point of that they died unbaptized), and a man ‘Roger’ who loses the battle to cancer. Ultimately, these brief stories aren’t meant to play into any larger connected narrative, but rather to illustrate the range of ways in which a person can pass on. This leads into the song’s chorus, which details the process of cleaning gravestones – “(♫) Acid on granite — white bubbles, yellow foam. Steel wool to clean the rust” – before further describing what will be called for when the time comes for the player character’s own epitaph to be written: “(♫) Scratch away the year and date. And a chisel for your own name, for when we come to go.” What follows is further contemplation from the elderly woman’s perspective (as is made clear through an interview with Gerry within the post-mortem), as she evidently passes by an unkept statue of Jesus within the cemetery, noting that she would “(♫) wipe the sand between his toes if I could still bend over.” In describing this verse, De Mol describes his lyrical intention: “When the rituals of death become memories, I suppose we enter a kind of peace.”

We could go on in detailing the brief remainder of the lyrics – a verse about how the woman would like her grave to be decorated, and a final stanza that describes her sense of calm within the titular Graveyard – but I think we’ve read enough to understand the intention here. In short, death comes for all of us, and that’s okay! While not necessarily something one should have to convince themselves to “look forward to,” our eventual deaths are still something we can all learn to accept with some degree of grace and dignity — a conclusion which we can possibly find an easier time coming to by visiting the graves of those who pass during our lifetimes. Not a terribly complex or revelatory thesis by any measure. But it’s an agreeable moral, I suppose, and the song which conveys it is certainly easy enough to listen to: Its sparse instrumentation really forces you to hear out the lyrics, while its relatively chipper tone helps in selling the idea of the transition from life to death as not having to be quite so gloomy. I reckon that it’s in listening to this song that players who proclaim their feeling “emotionally affected” by the game are most impacted, as it truly is an effective bit of musical composition. Now, with all that being said, we have to ask ourselves a big question here: Does the game on its own (sans song) effectively convey this same message? Last I checked, paintings don’t typically come with the benefit of full musical accompaniments spelling out the artist’s intentions to the audience. As such, it’s my belief that the game really ought to be able to stand on its own — to sufficiently get its own point across through its design, and the level of interaction (or lack thereof) it provides through gameplay.

I suppose this is where we should finally address the elephant in the room: That five dollar price tag placed on death as an “extra feature.” First, I’ve gotta take umbrage again with a somewhat misleading description of the feature as written on the Steam store page, which states that “every time you play [the old lady] may die.” What this fails to mention is that in order for the randomized death tick to activate, you actually have to be sitting on the bench and listening to the song. There’s no chance that your character can croak while they’re still up on their feet and wandering around the cemetery (checking out this video detailing all the game’s included animations shows that there’s no contingency for this), which is honestly kind of disappointing? I reckon half the reason folk may have bought this feature in the first place was for the hope in vain that the lady could just suddenly keel over before they even made it to the bench, or possibly even just moments after starting the game. Hell, I’d argue that in theoretical execution, it could further help to drive the point home that death is truly random, and that we’re unknowingly susceptible to it at any given moment. But if you think about it for a minute, you’ll realize that there’s no chance that Tale of Tales would’ve ever implemented the feature in this way: It’d just come across as too silly for their particular brand of self-seriousness, and it could even potentially prevent some players from ever getting to experience the musical centerpiece of the game (if they were so unlucky as to repeatedly die before ever reaching that point).

It’s easy to read into the idea of having to pay a premium for the ability to die as a measure of Tale of Tales’ contempt for their audience — a cynical concession made for those who would demand “death” in their games, assumedly of the scores of nameless enemies one would expect to mow down. And on some level, I can’t help but believe this was at least a thought in Auriea and Michaël’s minds — a want to subvert or condemn the insensitive way in which games typically treat death. After all, they take the time in their post-mortem to address the fact that they aren’t especially “fond of war stories and the like,”^[6m] and go on an especially laughable tangent in an interview with Gamastura about how they “are still sickened to the stomach by the memory of hurling hundreds of living bodies through the air with a gravity gun in Half Life 2” — additionally sermonizing that “even Mario and Pikmin are highly objectionable in this respect.”^[8] But to hear the explanation of this feature’s inclusion in The Graveyard directly from them (and to take them at their word), the motivation apparently had more to do with a want to demonstrate how a “small change can alter the experience [of a game] greatly,” and to “make the point that it is the experience that matters, not the length of the game or the number of levels or enemies or weapons, etcetera.” From their perspective, the possibility of the elderly woman dying while listening to a song about her own finite mortality is meant to make the messaging that much more impactful — to hammer home just how suddenly death can strike, and to possibly encourage the player to accept that possibility in their own life. It’s an attempt at invoking dramatic irony, where your knowledge of the possibility for the woman’s death can outpace her own realization, thereby driving home the point that it’s better to come to terms with mortality earlier rather than later, before it’s ultimately too late.

Anyway, here’s why the idea doesn’t work in actual execution (at least not for most players): From watching a number of first-time playthrough videos of The Graveyard, one of the most common reactions to watching the elderly woman pass is to believe that she’s simply fallen asleep, as the comical suddenness of the animation doesn’t seem to register to most as a moment of expiration. The way the game chooses to depict her death – by having the woman’s head slump forward while dropping her cane to the ground – really isn’t entirely clear, and the fact that it can only happen while relaxing on the bench could certainly add to the confusion as to whether or not she’s just napping. So as the song eventually wraps up, and you’re left with the image of the woman just continuing to sit on the bench – unable to interact with the game in any way other than to restart it – it feels lacking in any sort of the finality it’s seeking to convey. A fade to black [after the song finishes] would’ve honestly worked better here, rather than leaving players guessing at what (if anything) they should be doing. Even putting this apparent confusion aside, and taking the feature for what it is: It’s just tough trying to justify that five dollar price tag on it, for as little as I reckon it ultimately adds to the experience. Honestly, The Graveyard gets its message across succinctly enough without having to watch the old lady pass away, and the concept of making people have to pay to watch her die just muddies the intention? If anything, it’s far more likely to be interpreted by consumers as making them feel complicit in her death, which doesn’t feel like it plays into the game’s larger themes. Either way, I can see it leaving a bad taste in the mouth for some — even as it serves to simply amuse others. Perhaps that was the true intention of it all along?

This is the point at which I have to say that the piece as a whole just doesn’t work for me: That even in understanding its intended meaning, I just don’t feel like it does a particularly good job of convincing players that it’s a message worth examining or reflecting on? And to be very clear, there is clearly an intentional meaning that Tale of Tales are left to impart here, despite their claims that they simply desired to “generate questions and [to not] supply any answers.”^[6n] What they evidently failed to realize in stripping a game down to its basic-most functionality – and by sending players down a singular path – they inadvertently detracted from the openness for “interpretation” and deriving personal meaning. For all their claims to understand the potential of the medium better than their own contemporaries, this comes across as a rather shocking bit of short-sightedness on their part — a true failure to understand what differentiates interactive media from comparatively static formats (be it film, photo, canvas, et cetera). In treating The Graveyard as a sort of painting, and attempting to lock it down in the ways that a fixed medium entails, they fail to leverage the true advantage of interactive software: The ability for players to encounter wildly different outcomes based on their actions, and to interpret the meaning of a game through the lens of their own truly unique experience. In making every effort to make sure that players would all encounter more or less the same exact playthrough as one another, Tale of Tales eschews organic opportunities for story-telling completely, and forcibly subjects players to the particularly rigid way they envisioned it apparently “should be played.” Which would be fine, if they didn’t also claim at the same time that players should all be able to come away with their own uniquely personal interpretations!

I’m reminded of a classic Flash game, which played with the concept of death in a way I found far more impactful: Dean Moynihan’s One Chance, released on Newgrounds.com in 2010. In it, you play as a scientist whose attempt at curing cancer inadvertently unleashes a pathogen that begins to systematically kill Earth’s entire population, and are given in-game six days to do with what you see fit; whether deciding to spend that remaining time with your family, working diligently on a cure, or otherwise allowing the weight of your guilt to consume you. What’s particularly novel is the fact that once you’ve completed the game in any given way, it saves a cookie to your computer which prevents you from replaying it — whether you’re attempting to see the other endings or otherwise experiment with different permutations. Its intention would appear to be a commentary on how players will often exploit save / load systems in games in order to see all the different ways that paths can branch, or to otherwise avoid the consequences of their mistakes by constantly resetting (a practice which has come to be referred to as “save scumming”). But taken as an allegory for the permanence of death and our real-life inability to foresee every possible outcome of a decision, it also works as a surprisingly effective contemplation on how we choose to spend our precious time on this Earth — a test to determine what a player’s priorities might be if given the knowledge that their days are numbered, which ultimately forces one to reflect on their choices rather than simply try again for a more favorable outcome.

In comparing One Chance to The Graveyard, you get a real sense for what the latter title is sorely lacking when it comes to musing on mortality. One Chance gives you the freedom to truly explore it in a multitude of different ways, forces you to immediately confront the consequences of all your actions, and ends with a sense of finality that can genuinely weigh on you. The Graveyard – by contrast – only has its one walled-off route, gives you nothing in the way of choice or consequence, and comparatively treats death as completely meaningless by allowing you to immediately reset the game. Despite Tale of Tales seeking to convey the inevitability and conclusiveness of death, they completely fail to make it feel impactful through their chosen implementation, and do little to make the time spent preceding it feel purposeful (or to incentivize any desire for players to either prolong or re-experience it). What this really illustrates to me is how Tale of Tales’ rejection of traditional video game mechanics as being somehow “limiting” is completely at odds with their own creative intentions, where Dean Moynihan’s ability to play within the supposed confines of the format clearly demonstrates its potential effectiveness in telling stories and prompting introspection. By my measure, One Chance represents a far better utilization of the medium in conveying loftier ideas, and has the established tradition of conventional game mechanics to thank for it (as it cleverly seeks to subvert them). Ironically, The Graveyard’s refusal to engage with these mechanics on the grounds of rejecting “linear plot-based narrative constructions”^[6o] only winds up delivering the most linear product imaginable, as it deliberately strips the medium of everything that makes it unique.

What makes all of this especially frustrating is to have to read Michaël bemoaning the fact that gamers (and possibly lumping in developers) “expect to be spoonfed and don’t seem to have any experience with literature, modern theater or fine art (or even art films) which require active participation, not just of thumbs and index fingers but also of heart and brain.”^[6p] I, for one, would argue that Michaël here simply hasn’t played enough video games to justify these sorts of authoritative / holier-than-thou declarations. At the risk of skipping ahead a bit here: Tale of Tales would ultimately have to watch disappointedly as The Graveyard received unfavorable comparisons to other contemporaries in the medium — in particular, Jason Rohrer’s Passage. And in reading their posted reactions to these comparisons, it becomes clear that they still completely fail to understand that their self-imposed restrictions also have the effect of limiting the effectiveness of their output, even as they are explicitly told as much by their own friends and fellow developers! To hear them describe it: “Peer response from the indie game scene was a little odd. […] Our fellow game designers and indie game fans found Passage a superior product because it uses a conventional game structure to convey its message. To some extent The Graveyard is disqualified beforehand because ‘it is not a game.’ […] The gameplay in The Graveyard cannot be considered experimental/interesting/etc because it cannot be considered gameplay. Or something along those lines.” To see Tale of Tales so close to grasping the point their peers are raising here, but falling just short of actually internalizing it… Again, “frustrating” is the key word here.

If I were to do things differently – to take Tale of Tales’ premise and run with it – I’d certainly have a few ideas for how to go about it. And I’d like to think that even Auriea and Michaël would find much of it agreeable, considering much of it simply deals in reincorporating some of their own scrapped ideas! For starters, I feel like all that cut content really should’ve made the final revision; between the grave-exploring, the bird-feeding, and the concept of re-visiting the cemetery over the course of multiple different days or years. If Tale of Tales would’ve been able to manage it [given the constraints of their time and budget], I’d have had players get to experience the aging of the avatar into an elderly woman over the course of their chaptered structure — with her visits to her husband’s plot (at least the visits featured within the game) taking place decades apart, and each one prompting new potential for reflections and emotions from our character. In this way, the passage of time can be seen to bring her closer to her own inevitable passing, and have that thought weigh heavier on her as the years pass on; until a point where she can come to accept it (possibly contingent on in-game actions, or otherwise by randomization), and she’s able to face it with a sense of ease. In that way, a mechanic centering around the possibility of death at any point in time can take on further meaning, as her comfort and acceptance in that moment of passing can be colored as either beautiful or deeply tragic [depending on where she is emotionally in a given playthrough]. If they still wanted to keep that black-and-white post-processing filter incorporated, have the level of saturation change along with the chapters, either deepening with her ennui or brightening as she moves closer toward acceptance.

Of course, there’s the likely chance that implementing all those sorts of new features might’ve proven too much for Tale of Tales to handle, or that they might otherwise reject them on the conviction of their own design principles. At the end of the day, the version of The Graveyard we got is the one that Tale of Tales evidently wanted to make, warts and all. I suppose that we have to respect their choices, for as much as I am inclined to personally disagree with so many of them. I suppose that’s sort of the point of artistic expression though, innit? Still, if I could at least press them for just one alteration – to explain to them how going forward with it would forever overshadow discussion of the rest of their game – I’d make a strong recommendation for dropping that $4.99 price tag on the game’s ‘Full’ version. If not dropping it outright, at least lowering it to something like a buck, in keeping true to their supposed vision for it as a “symbolic gesture?” As it currently stands, so much of the discourse around the game centers on how apparently egregious consumers determined their price point was, and serves to distract from any discussion of the merits or message intended by the larger piece. If Tale of Tales were truly unconcerned by the “attempt to make money,” this would’ve certainly been a fine opportunity to demonstrate that lack of financial motivation; by not charging a price typically associated with comparatively more substantive games, for what effectively amounts to access to a single animation. Ironically, this move also probably would’ve netted the game more sales in the long run, and inadvertently wound up exposing more folk to the full scope of their vision. For whatever that’s worth.

But again, I must reiterate: My opinions are entirely subjective, and my suggestions may well go against the very intent of what Tale of Tales had hoped to convey through The Graveyard. At the end of the day, my experiences and conclusions can only be claimed as my own, and I don’t wanna be misinterpreted as claiming that my ideas are somehow objectively “better” than what Tale of Tales decided on. For as unsatisfied as I may have found myself after having visited the game, there are surely folk who came away from it with a sense of genuine appreciation and deeper contemplation. I certainly don’t intend to take that away from anyone, or claim their emotional responses as somehow “invalid” just because I personally didn’t get anything similar out of it. I guess what compelled me to cover this game in so much detail in the first place though – in addition to my originally stated goal of wanting to give it a “second chance” – is the fact that Tale of Tales clearly wanted The Graveyard to serve as some sort of pertinence on the state of the games industry as a whole — to prove some sort of point about how commercial games are somehow incapable of inspiring emotional responses? When they talk about how more conventional games can only ever occupy the role of “trivialities,” or attempt to draw some sort of differentiation between the stories that they’re telling and the “stories” (as they themselves denote in mocking quotation marks) that other games seek to tell, it just comes across as incredibly dismissive — downright elitist, even. It reads as them invalidating the genuine emotional responses that players might experience from playing the likes of a AAA game, and as their wanting to somehow prove to consumers that they haven’t experienced a real story worthy of their consideration.

The Graveyard has every right to exist within our medium. Those who would dismiss it as a “walking simulator” or claim it’s “not a real game” are ignorant. At the same time, we have to accept that the likes of formulaic AAA titles have a similar right to exist, even as so many of them are seemingly unmotivated by pushing artistic expression forward or intentionally imparting any deeper message onto players. Like it or not, that’s just the nature of media-centric industries: Big-budget commercial products aimed at the broadest market possible will always dictate the larger direction of a given medium, while smaller studios producing more intimate experiences seem to exist perpetually on the periphery — serving those in search of something outside of the conventional mainstream structure. And when an unfortunate reality of this scenario is having to watch in frustration as a casual consumer can immediately dismiss these smaller works as “boring” or “pretentious,” it’s easy to understand the instinct to lash out and similarly dismiss their enjoyment of their own media of choice. Simply telling them that there’s no merit or meaning to the games they consume isn’t the way to actually win them over, though — not when those works represent something they hold especially precious and dear. If you ask me, the best way to challenge their preconceived notions and open their eyes to the value of independently-produced games requires presenting something to them that feels familiar at first — which utilizes structures and mechanics they may already be familiar with. And then – through that familiar format – you work to subvert their expectations, and force them to consider the implications of how games traditionally reward emotionally-detached engagement with conventional mechanics. That’s the sort of revelation that inspires folk to begin questioning what games can potentially convey, and which can set them on a path toward appreciating works which further deviate from the rigid structures they’ve grown so accustomed to.

Of course, The Graveyard has no interest in incorporating any of those conventional mechanics, or presenting itself under the guise of a traditional video game. Not that it has to, of course: It can exist for consumers who are already able to appreciate non-traditional games, and challenge them to derive their own interpretations of the content within. If that’s all that Tale of Tales had sought to accomplish with The Graveyard, it’d be admirable enough. But the fact that they had at one point convinced themselves that this game had the potential to upset that well-established structure, or could prove itself to somehow be measurably superior to the ways in which more mainstream games engage their respective audiences? That’s where they lost the plot, and ultimately lost the ability to appeal to anyone outside of their own already-established niche. It is possible to understand and relate to their frustrations with the wider industry, but to also disagree with their approach in attempting to help “solve” the problem. As such, you can only take The Graveyard for what it is: “An experiment with poetry and story-telling” — not “without words,” in spite of their claims. A piece of art in the form of interactive software, created by a duo of developers who view “mechanics” as confines in and of themselves, thereby resulting in the game’s own potential for interpretation being limited by their stubborn refusal to present players with anything more than the ability to literally walk from “Point A” to “Point B” (and back again). Whether the game appeals to you or not depends on your own tastes and predilections, and whether or not you derive any meaning from the experience of playing it is contingent on your willingness to engage with it. And isn’t that as much as any artist could hope to ask for?

“(♫) Hier is het rustig, is het veilig.
Misschien volgende keer – volgende keer, misschien – dan blijf ik.”

“Too Big a Heart, Too Weak a Lung.”

“If it would have been a commercial project, it would have failed.”
Breakdown of sales figures recorded for
The Graveyard.

Reception to The Graveyard exists within two markedly different worlds: In its careful consideration by industry critics (between journalists and industry peers), and in its vehemently negative reaction from general consumers (seen in user reviews and comments). In recounting some of the largely positive press the game would receive, we can actually consult Tale of Tales’ post-mortem again, where they highlight a handful of reviews they evidently deemed as “getting” what they were going for. Chris Kohler for Wired would be cited as stating that “The Graveyard could have been a short film on YouTube and lost none of its presentational qualities, or its message. But the very limited interaction you have with the character […] instantly makes the connection deeper and more powerful than it would have been if you were simply watching.”^[9] He also goes on to describe his experience with the ‘Full’ version by explaining that “Death was a release. It was a release of five bucks from my Paypal account, too, but that’s neither here nor there.” John Walker for Rock Paper Shotgun would have a chance to preview the game, and would share their appreciation for the monochrome visuals [among other aspects]: “The black and white design is just right, a perfect motif for a graveyard, the gleaming white bench in the distance making pleasing use of mise en scene. But don’t rush – in fact, you can’t rush.”^[10] They’d also share what is included as their singular issue with the game: “Disappointingly, deviating from the main path isn’t an option, the camera retreating as you disappear to one side. When purporting to be about exploring, there’s not a great deal of that on offer.”

IGN’s coverage of The Graveyard began with an inspired choice of headline: “Play an Old Lady and Die, Maybe.”^[11] This post which served to announce the game’s release goes on to cover it in brief detail, noting that “as usual, with the work of designers Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn, there is no explicit goal to be achieved, or rewards to be collected.” It also includes a quote from a press release issued by Tale of Tales (seen quoted in similar announcements on The Escapist and Rock Paper Shotgun), in which the duo double down on their design decisions: “We know that The Graveyard is not really a game. We could have easily added some form of gameplay. But The Graveyard wasn’t designed just for the players to have fun. While it doesn’t make a clear statement about anything, we hope that playing the game gives people the opportunity to contemplate the various topics that the experience touches upon. Not even to come to some kind of personal conclusion (though it’s ok if you do). Just to think about death, and life, for a moment. It’s good for the heart.” IGN would again cover The Graveyard at that year’s E3, with writer Levi Buchanan sharing their thoughts after experiencing the game on the show floor: “The austere game is about completing a singular line of action. You guide a little old lady from the entrance of a graveyard to a bench at the foot of a church and then back out again. Sounds boring? Well, then you just need to expand the parameters of what a game can possibly be.”^[12] Clearly, Levi had been touched by the title, and went on to sell the weight of the game’s musical centerpiece: “This woman is intimate with death. And through that intimacy, she has built up a practical readiness for the limitations of mortality. It’s devastating. […] Never knowing if this trip to the final resting place of her loved ones will be the one where she joins them is tough. But it’s a hard beauty. And that is something that deserves celebration.”

And then there are the recognitions the game would receive in the form of industry accolades: A selection as part of IndieCade’s showcase at E3 2008 (explaining how Levi was able to discover it there),^[13] a nomination for the 2009 Independent Game Festival’s ‘Innovation’ award,^[14], and a further nomination as part of the European Innovative Games Award — a recognition Tale of Tales saw fit to issue a press release for through GamesIndustry.biz (“We’re proud to be on the shortlist. May the best old lady win!”).^[15] These honors do demonstrate that the ideas The Graveyard was trafficking in were certainly appreciated by a number of their peers in the industry, even as some seemed more reluctant to help boost it: Braid creator Jonathan Blow would directly decline to showcase the title during his ‘Experimental Gameplay Workshop’ at 2008’s Game Developers Conference, apparently after declaring to the duo his determination that “it is not a game.”^[6q] However, what is perhaps the most notable (and unlikely) nod the title would receive from an industry peer came courtesy of Naughty Dog’s Richard Lemarchand — lead designer for the Uncharted series. Speaking at an IndieCade keynote in 2011 – titled “Beauty and Risk: Why I Love Indie Games” – Richard would take the time to highlight how The Graveyard had directly influenced / inspired Uncharted 2: Among Thieves’ memorable ‘Tibetan Village’ location, and the way players would initially experience it as a set piece. It constitutes a rather long explanation / quotation from Lemarchand during the keynote, but I feel obligated to include a significant snippet of it here nonetheless, as testament to the inspiring power that Tale of Tales had clearly tapped into:

“I ended up taking responsibility for the production of one sequence that was a creative risk for us. It’s a sequence that I’m happy to say has become kind of ‘emblematic’ of the interactive cinematic techniques that Uncharted 2 used: Chapter sixteen, ‘Where Am I?’ — also known as ‘the peaceful village.’ […] The idea was that we could use an interactive, explorative sequence to show the village on a quiet day with clear weather, and to show the villagers who live there just happily going about their daily business. […] Then, when we finally return to the village later – to find it under siege by an army that had followed [the player] there – we would feel particularly bad and responsible; much more so than if they had just been dropped into another video game battle in a cool-looking level, and we’d somehow try to tell you told that you should feel some sort of way. However, some people around Naughty Dog didn’t think that this stroll through a quiet sunny space was gonna work at all. We were planning to disallow the player from running in this sequence — we were not gonna let them jump or climb, and we were not gonna allow them to perform any of their combat moves on the villagers or pull out their gun. People thought this was gonna be boring, and that players would just recoil away from the constrained interactivity when the rest of the game leading up to that point had been so rich.

However, I had ended up playing a game around the time we were talking about this sequence that had made me feel that this idea was definitely going to work. The name of the game was The Graveyard by Tale of Tales. […] I’d been very affected by The Graveyard, much more than I expected to be when I first heard about it. If you haven’t played it, you should. […] I thought that in the same way that The Graveyard had created a space for reflection in my daily life on the lunchtime when I played it, through a simplified version of the kind of dense interactivity I expect from a third person character action game, so our peaceful village sequence could provide the same kind of meditative room in the experiential space of Uncharted 2 players.” ~ Richard Lemarchand, Uncharted 2 lead designer^[16]

What this directly cited inspiration on a AAA title demonstrates to me is the fact that game designers and developers have always been interested in pushing the medium forward — in exploring the potential for more meaningful story-telling in games, and in evolving beyond conventional mechanics. Despite Tale of Tales’ own conjecture to the contrary, it’s obvious that most folk who get into games as a career (at least outside of the executive level) go into it with a vested interest in seeing the medium grow, and a want to be a part of that maturation process. To be clear, the read I get from Richard’s story here is that the idea for the sequence in the game had existed well before he had even played The Graveyard, but that his experience with the indie title emboldened him to commit to his vision in the face of pushback from his co-workers. In that sense, you can still clearly argue for The Graveyard as serving as a sort of proof that said concept could work — something that Lemarchand could show to his peers in order to demonstrate an existing precedent. That’s still a pretty valuable role for The Graveyard to have played in the process, and a recognition of its merit that cannot be denied. In this way, Tale of Tales undoubtedly managed to leave their mark on the larger industry, and that’s something that can never be discredited or taken away from them.

Which brings us to the subject of public response, and reviews left by the casual audience. And it is here where a very different story is told: An outright rejection of The Graveyard by consumers at large, with vocal negative reactions to pair. I reckon you can get a pretty good sense for how players felt about the game through reviews posted to its Steam store page / community hub, as well as comments left on the sorts of news articles and journalistic reviews we’ve mentioned above. That being said, I’m going to largely be pulling quotes from the Steam reviews in particular (though I’m not about to name and cite specific users here). Here, you’ll find such insights as “They should give you 5 euros instead of charging you 5 euros to participate in this experience,” or more worrying comments along the lines of “If I had paid even a penny for this pretentious mound of dog shit, I probably would have shot somebody.” Where one user helpfully points out that “We all have ideas, but most people have the decency of developing them before trying to market them,” another constructively chimes in to note that “[the game] is in black and white so if you’re black-white colour blind i cannot urge you enough to stay away from this game like wtf add some colour or something so the game is available to everyone.” One user was especially excited to post a true revelation which occurred for them over the course of their playtime: “I FINALLY UNDERSTAND WHY I WAS BORN!! MY PURPOSE IN LIFE IS TO DIE ON A BENCH IN A GRAVEYARD WHILE LISTENING TO THIS AMAZING SONG!!” I’m sure y’all get the picture by now: Most of these reviews were written with the sole intention of shitting on something the posters had no interest in understanding, or otherwise attempting to play at “irony” by posting over-the-top / deliberately misleading ‘Positive’ reviews. Such is the nature of the Steam community.

Perhaps the “review” most emblematic of complaints levied against the game comes courtesy of a video by the Game Grumps: An excruciating eleven minute exercise in unadulterated laziness, where they fall back on the absolute most basic of jokes (such repeatedly shouting “360° NO SCOPE” apropos of absolutely nothing) and make zero attempt to engage with any ideas the game might be trafficking in. Now, I’ll confess that I don’t really find the Game Grumps funny on the best of days, and that I find their shtick entirely intolerable on their worst. And to be clear, their video on The Graveyard would certainly seem to constitute one for the latter! But in this way, it actually does an unexpectedly solid job of representing the so-called “casual consumer;” between their absolute refusal to take the game at all seriously, and in demonstrating the tendency to further condemn it for not following conventional design. You can say what you will about Tale of Tales (you’ve certainly heard me say plenty by this point already), but there’s no denying that they worked hard to put these games together and to get their ideas across to players. And so, to dismiss all that effort so quickly and callously – to just immediately write it off as “boring” and leave it entirely at that – just reads to me like an admission that a given player doesn’t know [or so much as care to know] how to engage with video games beyond their surface-level mechanics. At that point, they may as well just lump themselves in with the folk who claim that the Call of Duty franchise “isn’t political,” and formulate all their game opinions through Twitter posts that hyper-fixate on one-off low-resolution textures in order to paint entire games as “incompetent.” It’s a brand of close-minded cynicism that I’m all too familiar with — a mindset I worked hard to pull myself out from, and which I feel I’m certainly a happier person for. But hey, I guess that’s not the kind of thinking that’ll get you an audience of five million subscribers.

With the posting of The Graveyard’s post-mortem on November 27th, 2008 (made available through Tale of Tales’ own website, as well as on Game Developer [formerly ‘Gamastura’]), Michaël would take the opportunity to record their own responses to player feedback and reactions. As they saw fit to distinguish it, reactions could be sorted across three distinct categories: Those who were “bored,” those who were “disappointed,” and those who were “delighted.” In describing the first camp: “Of course there is the expected response of the typical gamers whose desire for zombies whenever they see a cemetery is apparently insatiable. They tended to describe The Graveyard as ‘boring.’ Of course.”^[6q] Surprisingly, Michaël seemed nearly just as perturbed by those who dared to be ‘disappointed’: “A little bit up the ladder of human civilisation (Holy shit, dude. — Cass), we find the people who were turned on by the idea but turned off by the actual experience. They were ‘disappointed.’ From what we can see, this was either caused by a failure on our part to maximize the qualities of the game or by certain expectations coming from the player. Despite the fact that games are supposed to be interactive, many gamers still seem to be incredibly passive when it comes to the meaning of their entertainment.” It’s also here where we get that previously-mentioned quote about how most players apparently “expect to be spoonfed and don’t seem to have any experience with literature, modern theater or fine art;” which is just a brilliant way to win over those folk who came in genuinely wanting to give your game a fair shot. Finally, there were the players who were ‘delighted’ — the only people evidently worthy of Michaël’s consideration: “These people really enjoyed the game. And/or they were happy to see the experimentation that we’re doing with the medium.” Clearly, we can assume these fine folk are all connoisseurs of fine art and theater, unlike the filthy plebs who dared not to give The Graveyard glowing praise.

The post-mortem also does the service of disclosing the game’s sales and download figures all the way up to November, 2008 — before the game’s launch on Steam or its later App Store release. In tracking distribution of the Trial version through their website, they were able to record [at least] 120,000 unique downloads (“The real number is likely to be a bit higher, since we -literally- lost count a few times”).^[6s] An impressive number to be sure, where they were additionally surprised to find that MacOS users constituted roughly a quarter of those engagements. Which brings us to the Full version, and how many players were converted to paying customers: On that count, Tale of Tales recorded a meager 400 sales — a mere 0.34% conversion rate (“Enough to buy a new tv but far from sufficient to sustain our company”). By their recording, the bulk of these sales came within the first two months of the game’s release / during its press period, where the months that would follow would see a rough average of “25 copies [sold] per month.” Of course, Tale of Tales had expected as much from the start when it came to sales, and seemed relatively unbothered by the result: “We had no commercial intent whatsoever [with The Graveyard]. So we’re still in the dark about whether making small games like this is a viable enterprise. This is something we will explore with another project.” At the same time, they seemed genuinely content with the interest that players had taken in it — even as precious few of them were willing to part with money for it: “It is heart warming to know that over 100,000 people have played our game. That’s a staggering amount of people, more than would ever visit any media art festival or gallery exhibition. It’s nice to receive such confirmation that our choice of medium is not as insane as it may seem to some.”

Over the next two years, The Graveyard would make its debuts across Steam and the App Store, with the latter marketplace adjusting the price of the Full version to $1.99. What this expanded distribution reflects is Tale of Tales’ attempts to “play ball” with the expectations of the larger industry, as their own production aspirations and business operations were similarly growing. To this end, their follow-up title The Path released concurrently across their website and on Steam (as well as Direct2Drive) on March 18th, 2009, establishing it as their most market-friendly [and generally substantive] title to date. And for what it’s worth… The Path is genuinely great, y’all. Truly, The Graveyard walked [at a elderly woman’s pace] so that The Path could sprint through its virtual woods, and take players down roads they may not have been fully prepared to travel. To attempt to summarize – however poorly I may manage – it operates within the premise of “Little Red Riding Hood” to tell several different stories about girls coming of age, with literal and metaphorical ‘wolves’ representing the temptations and dangers its characters encounter as their naïve worldviews are challenged. It’s an effective work of horror in story-telling, which confronts you with the conceit that straying from the titular path can be as terrifying as it is necessary — that in order to mature (and to properly complete the game), you must be willing to face the evils of the world, and to learn from those experiences in order to emerge as a more complete person.

(Skip the rest of this paragraph to avoid mentions of sexual assault) As a content warning: The game is often interpreted / purported (erroneously, I feel) as presenting sexual assault as the recurring “evil” that each of the girls face. But outside of one scenario where that implication is more clear-cut (in playing as the seventeen year-old ‘Carmen’), I always got the impression that each of the girls have their own unique temptation and life-altering event to overcome, and that employing a singular read across all six of the main stories told does a disservice to the game and its narrative intentions. As Auriea saw fit to explain in The Path’s eventual post-mortem: “Some say blindly that the game is ‘about rape.’ And while that could be one of the interpretations — and I understand it — for me, those black-out moments after meeting her wolf are the moments of realization. Those are the times when a girl grows. And what happens in Grandmother’s House is not a murder but a shedding of childhood and an initiation to womanhood. Each girl one step closer to her fate.”^[17] I, for one, am glad that the developers were willing to challenge this particular interpretation — even as it must’ve killed them a bit to have to tell folk “how to” properly interpret their game. In either case, it’s a thematic element which does appear in at least some capacity within The Path, and which may understandably turn some players off of engaging with it at all. I can only promise that it’s not particularly graphic in any of its possible depictions, and that Tale of Tales confronts the subject without the intention of “shock value for the sake of shock value.”

The Path would wind up becoming a critical darling, and receiving near-universal acclaim from the journalistic front. But it did not come without its criticisms: Reviewers were careful to convey to readers that the game required a degree of patience, as the traversal through the world can often require prolonged wandering and exploration through largely samey environments. Furthermore, its presentation may not have proven palatable to all; between stylized graphics (far more painterly than The Graveyard, funnily enough), a difficult-to-parse interface, and myriad technical issues arising from a return to Quest3D. Perhaps most pertinently though, it carried a similar disclaimer as The Graveyard did for casual consumers, which most writers would similarly land on: It’s short on traditional “gameplay,” and even shorter on answers on how you’re meant to feel. To quote IGN’s Charles Onyett: “The Path incorporates some challenging ideas though refuses to draw any clear conclusions. If you’re someone who requires concrete answers, you’re not going to be happy with Tale of Tales’ effort. Coming up with interpretations of what’s going on in this twisted game world is up to you, and that’s the main reason to play.”^[18] All said though, I believe it represents a far more accessible / interactive iteration on the style of story-telling that Tale of Tales were seeking to develop, and the consumer audience seemed to receive it far more readily for their part. In recounting their own reactions to the game’s release and response, Auriea was ready to admit that “designing purely for non-gamers is relatively futile, because the limited marketing means of an independent developer do not suffice to reach this audience. On the other hand, we have also learned that at least part of the gamer audience is very open to the experiences we create, even if they cannot strictly be categorized as games.”^[17b] The game would move nearly 50,000 copies within the first year and a half of its availability, at a price of $9.99 per sale (discounting its temporary availability at sale price as part of a ‘Best of Indie Bundle’ on Steam).

While 50,000 copies sold represents an obviously massive improvement over performance of The Graveyard, it was perhaps not quite as inspiring to Auriea and Michaël as one might assume — not so significant as to motivate a complete pivot in their long-term approach to game design: “While it is nice to know that our hard work has been rewarded, the commercial success was too moderate to really justify a repeat of this same formula. […] Perhaps the PC/Mac market is too small for mid-sized indie games like The Path. We’re still hoping somebody can help us port the game to a console.”^[17c] We can track what would be the eventual turn – in some way – through their continued releases following The Path. First on the list would be Fatale (released November 4th, 2009), which serves as a digital interpretation and exploration of the “Dance of the Seven Veils” — returning Tale of Tales to their roots in re-interpreting biblical stories. More specifically, it seems to pull heavily from Oscar Wilde’s one-act play adaptation of the story, titled Salomé. All this is to say that Fatale is a highly experimental piece, which sees you floating through the team’s constructed world and appreciating their work in lovingly texturing and modeling it. In other words: It represents a return to their “nongame” philosophy, albeit a far more elaborate and mature entry into that subgenre — “mature” not just in the evolution of their design, but also for the fact the game itself is very much rooted in themes [and abstract depictions] of sex. Fatale certainly isn’t for everyone – as its mixed reception would seem to indicate – but I found myself quite intrigued by it as a truly unique experiment in story-telling. It clearly demonstrates Tale of Tales taking a step back from the conceits they had made in making The Path more accessible / akin to a traditional game, but a creative diversion which I still find value in nonetheless.

Tale of Tales next game to release would be the iPhone-exclusive Vanitas in February, 2010 (eventually making its way to Android in 2011), which would leverage the smartphone form factor in order to deliver a virtual toy box of sorts. In fact, the application presents itself as a literal wooden box, which is populated by three randomized objects (from a pool of thirty-five) for you to interact with. You can move ‘em around, shake them up, potentially break a few of them… oh, there are arbitrary ‘gold stars’ awarded on the off-chance you happen to have three identical objects appear! You can fill those out on the game’s title screen for a total of twelve, which I think corresponds to the objects in the box aging and deteriorating over time? It’s, uhh… Well, it’s certainly not for me, at the very least. But at the same time, I can at least envision and understand a sort of therapeutic value for some in opening the digital box, and occupying some of their idle time with the gimmicks within? Either way, we have to chart this one as another departure from that “traditional game design” Tale of Tales were still having to come to terms with, and determine that most players were similarly unimpressed by what they perceived as a “novelty” app. Honestly, I’m somewhat inclined to not count this one as a marker on the timeline, as the particular means of its distribution / far smaller scale represents something of a departure from what even they would probably perceive as their “mainline” games.

Perhaps this smaller work also represented something of a “stop-gap” — an interim release while the studio toiled on their next desktop title, Bientôt l’été. Released on December 12th, 2012, Bientôt l’été represents a full-fledged return to the abstract and inaccessible — a true “nongame” made to challenge conceptions of what the medium of interactive software could entail, and an embracing of every pretentious cliché the duo could seem to think of in an concerted effort to alienate casual consumers. Smoking cigarettes and drinking wine while playing chess at a café? Check. Communicating with other players online entirely through disconnected lines of pseudo-philosophical dialogue spoken in French? Check. Your entire reality being a holographic illusion projected by your spaceship as you drift immeasurable light-years away from real human contact? Check. Come on, Tale of Tales: You think I wouldn’t catch that reference to Godard’s 1978 sci-fi romp, ‘L’espace est Foutu?’ Unlike some plebeians, I’ve seen an art film or two in my time! No matter how you slice it, Bientôt l’été is a game designed to be as unapproachable and unmarketable as possible, practically daring the casual consumer to not take it seriously… Except, the times had changed. Where reviewers on Steam were once quick to pen single-sentence joke recommendations, Tale of Tales now had to contend with an audience more ready to take them to task on a far more critical level. Where many actually came away with an appreciation for the game – highlighting its strong aesthetic notes, and interpreting it as a digital treatise on the struggles of digital communication (a theme Auriea and Michaël had actually tapped into in their Entropy8Zuper! days, through a publicly broadcasted chat client / performance piece titled Wirefire) – there were just as many critics, who were now willing to concede points of merit between their more thoughtfully-constructed complaints.

While that isn’t to say that all of Bientôt l’été’s reviews under the ‘Not Recommended’ category are quite so thorough (you still have your share of single-word reviews comprising of the word “No”), the reception at large marks a turning point nonetheless: Tale of Tales were no longer capable of shocking players as they were once so easily able to. The idea that video games could be art was no longer a point of heated contention. Titles such as Dear Esther and Journey had proven the abilities of other developers to market non-traditional games to large audiences, and for independent creators to push the boundaries of the medium further — all while delivering inherently more accessible products than Tale of Tales ever had. Without the power of novelty on their side – being one of the only developers [for a time] willing to take these sorts of avant-garde creative gambles – critics were now honing in on more nuanced issues in how Auriea and Michaël were attempting to convey their ideas, and challenging recurring design flaws which they had yet to / refused to amend. Where the duo used to be able to get away with games that barely managed to run on high-end computers – purely on the merit of their tapping into then-unexplored and evocative concepts – the standard had now been set above them: The expectations from both casual consumers and supporters of the arts alike had risen to a point that Tale of Tales would have to work to catch up to. Whether they liked it or not – if they hoped to remain relevant in the burgeoning indie scene – they were going to have to learn to embrace traditional game mechanics.

Luxuria Superbia would release on November 5th, 2013; with intentions to launch across Windows and MacOS, iOS and Android, and even on the ill-fated OUYA. Surprisingly, it represents possibly the most “game-like” entry in Tale of Tales’ entire catalogue: A tunnel shooter, of sorts, in which you navigate vibrant tracks; touching objects passing down the lanes in order to score points and add color to the scenery, and avoiding objects which would desaturate the environment. At the same time, you’ll have to account for your speed, where going too fast can end a given level “prematurely.” In effect, the entire game is a metaphor for bringing sexual partners to climax, with budding flowers taking the place of human bodies and/or genitalia. If you can get past whatever prudishness you might have about the implied subject matter (or if you’re not legitimately sex-repulsed), Luxuria Superbia is a truly neat little piece of suggestive interactive software, designed with touch-enabled devices in mind for maximum playing pleasure. At the same time, it marks such a seemingly significant departure for Tale of Tales, you have to spend your time playing it wondering what brought them to this point? What motivated such a stark departure for the studio who once claimed that “the constant need to score points” was not a compulsion worth indulging? To that end, I suppose we need to look at the game’s own reception, and take notice of the direction in which things were headed for Tale of Tales: Luxuria Superbia would seem to mark a new record low in sales and player engagement across digital distribution platforms, as part of a downward trend that had begun after the peak popularity of The Path and saw furthering decline with each of their successive releases. Not only that, but mainstream review outlets which had once feverishly promoted every release by the duo were now starting to cool off; with Cameron Woolsey for GameSpot declaring Luxuria Superbia’s “overly simplistic controls and a refusal to evolve” as damning it to “the realm of tedium, turning this colorful ride into a tiring venture.”^[19] Tale of Tales still had catching up to do, and the distance was still only widening.

Which brings us to the grand finale — Tale of Tales’ last chance at endearing themselves to a more general public, and delivering a game which could balance their story-telling aspirations with traditional gameplay hooks: 2015’s Sunset, and its first-person simulation of housekeeping for the financial elite. Needless to say, Auriea and Michaël weren’t about to sacrifice so much of their integrity as to simply submit to the wants and whims of the mass market. Bearing that in mind, the game represents another in their experiments with introspective experiences: Coming to terms with an unrequited love for an employer you’ll never meet, set against the backdrop of a revolution you can’t meaningfully participate in (at least not through direct gameplay), all while attending to household chores that are conveyed entirely through activating a button prompt and the screen fading in and out. At seemingly every opportunity, it denies you the ability to engage with it as you would a traditional video game, and instead uses text prompts and inner monologue to explain the tasks and actions you attend to. At its core, then, it must be a game about passivity — an exercise in playing with your want to participate in a story, while knowing your limited means of actual interactivity are ultimately irrelevant and pointless? Because that’s certainly the only read I was able to derive during two hours spent revisiting the same apartment suite roughly a hundred times over; checking repetitive and meaningless chores off a to-do list, being told about a civil war I had no role in (save for secretly sharing a document or two with your revolutionary brother), and watching as a city burns around my place of work. I think at some point, my character wound up falling head over heels in love with my unseen boss – a man implied to be complicit in the corrupt government’s actions – based entirely on assumptions she makes from seeing what kind of books he reads and paintings he hangs up? You start leaving him saucy letters at a certain point, and the ending seems to imply that you sleep with him after the revolution tidily wraps up in the background, and… I don’t know, man. Sunset is certainly attempting to convey some sort of story or message here, but it was clearly one I couldn’t relate to or see myself participating in.

Maybe it didn’t help my understanding of the larger themes and underlying conflict when my brain started to tune out completely: The incredibly limited means of interactivity combined with the woefully repetitious nature of your assigned tasks just left me fading in and out of my mental engagement with the piece. In a word, it’s tiring — especially as you’re treated to an endless litany of dime-store platitudes every time you decide to inspect elements of the evolving environment around you. When my character’s response to an abstract painting is to remark (via on-screen text) “maybe it’s ugly but at least it’s not trying to sell me something,” her assessment of gifts given to her employer amounts to “rich people get pretty gifts,” and her reaction to the deafening sound of jet planes buzzing overhead is to simply remark “oh, men and their desire to flex muscles for each other;” I was inadvertently trained to stop seeking out these prompts after a period of time, and simply attend to my business around the abode as quickly and efficiently as possible. That still won’t save you from some of the audio introspections though, including a particularly choice line that unintentionally left me laughing: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. Kennedy said that — just before THEY KILLED HIM.” Combine all this with the fact that the game barely manages to run at all due to Tale of Tales’ new record lows in optimization, and you’re left with a game that struggles to maintain your attention and engagement across even its fleetingly short playtime. And what makes all this so especially frustrating is the fact that – according to Auriea and Michaël – this final product truly represents what they believed would be their “game for gamers.”^[20]

Whether you appreciate and enjoy Sunset or not (I can certainly understand the appeal to some, and respect the efforts that went into its production), I don’t think there’s any way to deny the fact that it represents one of their least accessible projects to date — at least in terms of mass market appeal. Beyond its clear continuation in Tale of Tales’ challenging of design conventions and player expectations, it’s simply not a game that appears interested in providing players with the sort of engaging mechanics or satisfying hooks that would seem to be part and parcel to a “gamer’s game.” Let’s be real here: The specific game that Tale of Tales were attempting to chase after – by their own admission – was 2013’s Gone Home. And in identifying that title as somehow representing the state of the industry at large, they seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that its success was something of an anomaly — a fortuitous one which helped move the medium forward, mind you, but certainly not an accurate measure for where the mainstream audience had come to comfortably settle. A game like Gone Home could succeed at that moment in time because there was little else like it, and because its novelty served as a refreshing reprieve from the endless deluge of standard genre games that still represented the norm. Gamers are a fickle bunch, and to see games like Sunset following so quickly in Gone Home’s wake likely scared them — gave them reason to fear that the game industry was moving too quickly for them, and that the games they more regularly enjoyed were somehow at risk of disappearing. It’s the same sort of irrational fear which led to the whole initial pushback against “walking simulators” in the first place — a similar panic to what the likes of Myst and FMV games had inspired over a decade prior to that. And though the industry would never actually abandon the market-researched game structures which have continued to prove their most lucrative successes, you can still find folk who believe that “voting with their wallets” and avoiding these odd games out is the only thing keeping the industry from suddenly abandoning them — like making ritual sacrifices to appease a vicious deity. Sunset certainly made for a fine offering to that bloodied altar.

What made all this especially unfortunate is the fact that Sunset truly represented an act of desperation by its developer: A genuine last-ditch effort to gain some sort of traction in the market, where its failure would represent no less than the irreparable financial ruin of Tale of Tales themselves. For starters, the VAF – previously their primary financial benefactors – had changed much of their requirements for funding since the days of The Graveyard, and no longer seemed interested in helping fund so-called “artistic games” — at least not to the same extent as they had before, measurable in percentage of total budget they were willing to cover. It’s a subject which Michaël covers in this short essay / call to action, for those interested in the further intricacies of it. What this in turn forced for Tale of Tales was a move to crowdfunding on Kickstarter in order to secure a production budget for Sunset, which they seemed fortunate in managing to nearly triple their set goal for (raising $67,636 USD against an ask of $25,000). It seems this enabled and motivated them to take further steps in attempting to guarantee Sunset’s success in the market, in order to ensure that the game could prove profitable — which, in this instance, they were evidently banking on, as they were (or would be) in debt to multiple different parties come end of production. To hear Auriea and Michaël describe some of the drastic measures they took: “We spent a lot of money on a PR company who got us plenty of press, took some work and worries off our shoulders, and found us other marketing opportunities. But it didn’t help sales one bit. […] We worked hard on presenting a gentler Tale of Tales to the public. Which basically meant that Michaël was forbidden to talk in public and Auriea often just smiled at the camera, parroting words whispered in her ears by communication coaches. Didn’t make a difference.”^[20b]

Tale of Tales describes much of the process of Sunset’s production and marketing as if it was done at gunpoint — under a duress so extreme as to cause them to abandon all their principles and beliefs, in order to develop a product which needed to succeed in order to keep them afloat. And for all their sacrifices and struggle, what did they ultimately achieve? 4,000 copies sold.^[20c] A pittance made all the more dire by the fact that Kickstarter backers are additionally counted (and apparently constitute a lion’s share) in that tally. To call Sunset a “commercial failure” would be an understatement: Not only did it fail to cover Tale of Tales’ immediate debts, but it also painfully illustrated the fact that Tale of Tales could never hope to establish a viable business model in the games industry — that further attempts would only inevitably end in further financial ruin for them. And so, they made the only choice that appeared logical to them: They left the games industry. Having determined that they could never hope to understand the whims of the market or the wants of consumers, Auriea and Michaël decided it was best to stop trying, and to end this chapter of their collective careers: “We really did our best with Sunset, our very best. And we failed. So that’s one thing we never need to do again.” And while I wish I could tell you that their exit was a graceful one — perhaps a humble admission of their defeat, and a “hope to see you soon” sent to their longtime fans… Well, you all know by now that Tale of Tales were never gonna let themselves go quite so “gently” into that good night. Instead, they decided to burn every last bridge they had ever built, and to loudly declare no less than their undying hatred for every facet of the industry they had perceived as rejecting them.

… Or, at least, that’s become the popular narrative as presented in retrospect. Don’t get it wrong: Tale of Tales certainly made more than a few unfortunate tweets in the immediate aftermath of announcing their closure. Stating that they wouldn’t be returning to game development “until the game industry gets rid of the vermin that it enables and encourages” certainly reads as their conspiratorially passing blame onto others for their own shortcomings. And this ridiculous bit in which they wish for gamers to “die in the same agony that you caused to thousands of defenceless virtual creatures” is as absolutely uncalled for as it is embarrassing to read. But what you should probably try to understand is the full context here: That at the same time Tale of Tales were already having to deal with the incredibly stressful prospect of financial ruin, and the emotional weight of having to end a near fifteen year artistic endeavor; they were now also being subjected to a constant bombardment of mockery and ill-wishes on the social media front, courtesy of the GamerGate collective at the peak of their vitriolic infamy. We don’t have the time here to get into the whole history of this stupid movement and their mission to harass progressive voices in the games industry (I guess we’ll save that for an article centered around a game more directly synonymous with these cretins), so let’s just say that they leaped at the opportunity to exacerbate all the negative feelings Tale of Tales were already venting with regards to the industry as a whole. And while so many of the throwaway accounts created to forward this movement through Twitter have since been suspended – to where much of their taunting and targeted harassment has been lost to time – you can still piece from Tale of Tales’ surviving replies that they couldn’t help themselves but to engage with this bad faith criticism of their situation [while at the same time attempting to maintain a cordial front with their industry peers]. Why history seems to have conveniently forgotten this aspect of the “Tale of Tales Twitter drama” isn’t particularly hard to figure out: Auriea and Michaël had always had a contentious relationship with the games industry, and a tendency to complain about facets of it that came across as them being unreasonable and pretentious. And so, it’s easy to color the whole fiasco as Tale of Tales going on another one of their “unhinged outbursts,” and assume there wasn’t any directly motivating factor to their frustrated replies.

To further that point: If you followed Michaël’s blog on the Tale of Tales website, you’d have already been routinely subjected to the likes of nonsense takes including how video games shouldn’t be played on laptops, or heard him complain about the very nature of game reviews at a time where folk took review scores as a sort of objective gospel. Add to that the incredibly dismissive ways that he talked down to gamers in general (see previous quotes from The Graveyard’s post-mortem), and you can see why some saw Tale of Tales as an inherently “toxic” brand — to the point that even some of their industry peers were prepared to publicly distance themselves from Tale of Tales as soon as the Twitter situation popped off. Perhaps the most notable of these severances can be seen in the case of The Astronauts’ Adrian Chmielarz — the studio behind The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and one of the leads on said game. In a blog post titled “What Really Happened to Tale of Tales’ Sunset,” Adrian goes on to detail not just how Sunset had failed to live up to its promise of being a “game for gamers” – providing genuinely constructive criticisms of its design – but also to publicly condemn Tale of Tales’ perceived behavior on Twitter (accusing them of “throwing a tantrum and claiming to hate the audience they tried to sell their product to”^[21]), and highlighting their apparent hypocrisy (“If you want your art to challenge the status quo, it’s a bit odd to expect the status quo to care. Leaving the art form just because the status quo was not moved by your first commercial attempt is even odder.”) While the post as a whole is honestly pretty well-reasoned and sympathetic to Tale of Tales, I think it still may have inadvertently served as an exacerbating factor in the ill will toward the studio? It became a hot link on Reddit, was interpreted by the public as a sign of the indie scene cutting ties with Tale of Tales, and has since gone on to become a short-hand reference material for when folk ask for a quick digest on the company’s exit from the industry.

As we wrap up this account of Tale of Tales’ time in the games industry, I reckon it’s important to remind ourselves that Auriea and Michaël are human beings — members of a species susceptible to emotions, liable to let frustrations get the better of them, and vulnerable to the crushing weight of public scrutiny. While some of their behavior during their time in the games industry is certainly questionable (if not outright condemnable), I think we still need to view it with an understanding of the immense pressure that must’ve been building up over the course of their entire career — through the lens of a pair of artists who dove headfirst into a medium they had little initial understanding of, and even less preparedness for the capacity of detractors to seem to take their creative output as personal affronts: “We hadn’t anticipated that instead of ignoring things they didn’t like, many gamers felt the need to express how they hated our work, and they often do so in disturbingly uncouth ways. As a result, creating games that deviate from thematic and formal conventions requires walking on eggshells and is ultimately very discouraging for creativity.”^[22] Can you confidently claim that if you were put in their shoes – with all the industry’s eyes on you – that you wouldn’t find yourself similarly frustrated in the ways they were, and prone to the same sort of emotional outbursts they were so routinely mocked for? Perhaps we might not phrase our complaints and displeasures in such uniquely pompous ways as they occasionally might have, but that’s beside the point: The pair weren’t perfect, and neither were their games or their responses to criticism. But to err is human, and just because their games routinely challenged established conventions doesn’t necessarily mean that they believed their own ideas to be perfect in their execution. At a certain point, they must’ve recognized that their creative output was no longer coming from a sense of amateurish optimism in exploring a new medium, but had instead begun to pour messily from their developed pessimism toward an industry that they no longer felt appreciated by. At that point, stepping away might’ve well been the best thing for them.

Tale of Tales may have bowed out of the commercial games industry, but Auriea and Michaël still persist. Without providing anything like an extensive timeline for the sequence of events following Tale of Tales’ dissolution: They’ve since taken up roles as educators, leading courses in “Game Art” [as well as “Game Critique”] for the Iulm University in Milan, Italy. I think this is honestly a wonderful move on their part, and I imagine their acquired knowledge of the industry will prove invaluable to their classes of aspiring developers and designers. At the same time as they’ve occupied themselves with this career in higher education, they also manage to find the time to operate Tale of Tales’ successor company, Song of Songs. Without the pressures and obligations of the commercial industry weighing on them, they’ve only gotten far more eccentric and avant-garde with their output (check out their presentation for an absolutely baffling piece titled Cricoterie), and seem far happier not having to deal with the public eye being so sharply focused on their every release. While they seem particularly enamored at the moment with exploring virtual reality as a new frontier, they still haven’t forgotten about old technologies and the more “primitive” Internet they cut their teeth in. To that end, they’ve made efforts to archive and preserve their works from the Entropy8Zuper! days (explaining how that webpage is somehow still functional roughly twenty-three years later), as well as currently working to recreate The Endless Forest in Unreal Engine in order to ensure that human-faced deer will still have a digital reserve to roam for years to come. I get the impression that Auriea and Michaël are genuinely content with their current lot in life — to get back to producing the sort of art they’re truly passionate about, without having to deal with the immense stress of life in the gaming industry’s spotlight. If they’re happier for it now, then I’m genuinely happy for them. And that’s all I have to say about that.

When it comes time to reflect on Auriea and Michaël’s time as Tale of Tales and the sum of their contributions to the industry, I’m left with two minds about it: On the one hand, their confrontational shtick and refusal to acknowledge a single nice thing about the larger industry does still grate on me, and leaves a part me wanting to argue with them over every last one of their more ridiculous opinions parading as “wisdom.” If they had just been willing to admit that the field wasn’t completely bereft of inspiration – to more diplomatically describe it as simply being “slow to change” from established formula and market convention – I reckon we’d all have a much easier time of agreeing with their sentiments. If they hadn’t gone on all of their contentious tirades, or so readily condemned players for providing anything less than glowing commendations of their output it’d be easier for folk to put themselves out there as supporters of their work. In rendering all the standard means of consumer-developer engagement so challenging, the voices which were most inspired to speak out would largely wind up being the most toxic and negative. But what if the challenge was the point all along? Can we really say that the route of “peaceful revolution” ever really motivates anything in the way of meaningful change? (I think JFK may have had a quote about that…) In this way, we might try to view their consistently confrontive attitude as a willingness to paint themselves as “the villains” in the story of video games — a belief on their part that in order to affect that change they wanted, they had no choice but to present themselves as a threat to what consumers held dear. In forcing their captive audience to listen to what they had to say – by delivering it as such loud and combative protest, and spurring them to challenge their actions at every turn – perhaps their plan all along was that it’d have to inspire some amount of self-reflection — to leave folk wondering if there wasn’t at least a kernel of truth to their condemnations of the industry at large?

It’s here where I’ll admit to not just finding merit in much of Tale of Tales’ works of art, but also concede [at least partially] to the merit of their mission statement: Auriea and Michaël were a pair truly committed to pushing the medium of games forward, and challenging the notions of what interactive software could attempt to convey. Understanding the road that brought them to where they were – between their encounters with the early Internet, the forced deprecation / obsolescence of their original output, and their frustrations with the formulaic nature of mainstream game design – I find myself more easily able to relate to them, and sharing at least some sense of alignment with their protests. As someone lucky enough to experience the same “glory days” of the world wide web as they did, and who has similarly had to bear pained witness to the rise of corporatization and template-driven domination; I totally understand their fears that video games might fall victim to the same sort of takeover, and never fully capitalize on their full potential as a medium for story-telling. I guess where I ultimately wind up differing from Auriea and Michaël though is in the fact that I’ve been able to hold on to my optimism: At the same time as I’ve had to watch the near-monopolization of the larger industry by a small handful of manufacturers and publishers, I’ve still been able to keep an eye on the world outside of that narrow focus — to observe as smaller studios and independent developers have been able to persist and mature in their output, and to deliver truly intimate and personal experiences through their games. Tale of Tales were involved in that movement from near its very beginning, but it was their unceasing negativity which ultimately drove them away from their own contemporaries, and saw them pushed out of a conversation they had a rightful claim to having started.

As for my final thoughts on The Graveyard itself: I can recognize that in giving it that “second chance” I set out to approach it with, I’ve certainly learned to better appreciate the artistic and creative intention behind it — to perceive it in a way that I wasn’t quite equipped to fourteen years ago. Sure, my assessment of the end product may well be the same as it was back then, where I’ll now confess that I still find the whole thing more “goofy” than it is “emotionally poignant.” But I don’t reckon that my opinion of it as a playable game is particularly important here: Honestly, I’m more interested in using this as an opportunity for self-reflection — to observe my own maturation as a person since I first played it so many years ago. The fact that I can look back on a game I was once happy to simply make fun of and now find myself completely devoid of that impulse helps show me how far I’ve come. Where I once failed to give a second thought to the circumstances of the creation of “bad” games, my immediate instinct now is the compulsion to immerse myself in research and to better recognize the intentions behind them, so that I might articulate those discoveries (and my appreciation of them) to an audience in search of similar understanding. In learning to give more fair assessments to video games that fall outside of conventional design or critical acclaim, I’ve become more passionate and informed about the medium as a whole, and have learned to respect the creative process in a way which motivates me to be a more understanding and empathetic person. I don’t have to like The Graveyard to respect the efforts of the team behind it, and I’m not compelled to convince y’all to blindly share in my opinion of it: Instead, I can encourage you to give it a shot for yourselves, and earnestly hope that it resonates with some of you in way that it might not have for me. And if I can further convince some of you to challenge your own preconceived notions of Tale of Tales in the process? Well, I’m certainly glad to have been of help, and I hope I’ve done the developer duo some small service in the process.

Oh, by the way: This actually was our April Fool’s Day article for this year. As per usual, the tradition has been to pen completely genuine articles about games that are often written off as “jokes,” and to occasionally sneak in some sort of minor recurring gag or gimmick within the text. The gimmick this year is simply that I didn’t mention any of this at the top of the article, and that I managed to convince at least some of y’all to read roughly twenty-three thousand words about a game with an average playtime of approximately six minutes. Not only that, but I somehow managed that feat without even once referencing ‘Tale of Games’ or Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden! Score another one for “Cass the Prank Master!”

[1] Khaw, Cassandra. “Indie Devs In Love: Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn […]” IndieGames.com. April 18, 2011. Web. (Archive)
[2] Chalk, Andy. “The Endless Forest: Second Decade […]” PC Gamer. November 7, 2016. Web.
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[4] Grant, Steve ‘Khad.’ “The Endless Forest.” Something Awful. December 22, 2007. Web.
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[7] Harvey, Auriea. “Let’s Make a Video Game!” IndieCade East 2014, Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY). February 2014. Keynote. (Video available)
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[10] Walker, John. “Preview: The Graveyard.” Rock Paper Shotgun. March 20, 2008. Web.
[11] “Play an Old Lady and Die, Maybe.” IGN. March 21, 2008. Web.
[12] Buchanan, Levi. “E3 2008: The Graveyard.” IGN. July 16, 2009. Web.
[13] Pearce, Celia. “The State of the Indie-Stry 2008.” IndieCade. July 16, 2008. Web. (Archive)
[14] “2009 Independent Games Festival Announces Finalists.” GDC. January 7, 2009. Web.
[15] “The Graveyard — Tale of Tales’ ‘interactive vignette’ nominated […]” GamesIndustry.biz. October 22, 2008. Web.
[16] Lemarchand, Richard. “Beauty and Risk: Why I Love Indie Games.” IndieCade 2011, Downtown Culver City (Los Angeles, CA). October 2009. Keynote. (Video available)
[17] b c Harvey, Auriea. “Postmortem: Tale of Tales’ The Path.” Game Developer. July 22, 2010. Web.
[18] Onyett, Charles. “The Path Review.” IGN. March 24, 2009. Web.
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[20] Samyn, Michaël. “And the sun sets…” Game Developer. June 22, 2015. Web.
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