A Mortician's Tale

To start out, this game has been around for a couple of years. Plenty of other, far more qualified people have played it and reviewed it and gave commentary about it. So, after I finished playing and stopped crying for the last time, I had looked up other reviews people had for this game. Mostly because I'm a very emotional person and needed to see validation for my strong feelings about the death industry.

So, A Mortician's Tale is a hot and spicy one hour visual novel from 2017 created by Laundry Bear Games that took me four hours to complete cause I cried no less than a half dozen times and had to keep stopping. It follows the career of a recent mortuary science graduate named Charlotte, usually referred to as Charlie, that is just begining to work at a small, family run funeral home. Most of the gameplay is a lot of point-and-click (EDIT: I have just been informed that point-and-click games are actually a genre in and of themselves?!?!?!) around Charlie's workspace to read emails, prepare cadavars for viewing or cremation, and interacting during funeral services.

So, quick side note, I am currently having a CRISIS!! Since Point-And-Click games are apparently an old genre, my brother is not going to hold the fact that I didn't know what it was against me, but he has also just informed me that A Motician's Tale is basically a Point-And-Click game after I described it for him. So, it's been a very informative vocab lesson and crisis here.

You go through a few different preperation services with different bodies. Some need to get stitched up, a few's families don't want them to be embalmed. For cremations, you have to remove certain objects from the deceased like jewelry or other meaningful items before they go through the cremation process. Along with these tasks, there's a few background storylines, like Charlie's friend Jen Love that works as a curator in a museum in London, the growing friendship between Charlie and her coworker Matthew Jeffrey, an online death positive magazine subscription service, and the building financial troubles of the Rose and Daughter's Funeral Home.

The buyout of Rose and Daughter's by a large funeral company bring one of the main major changes in the storyline. Between new policy changes and different approaches, there's a lot of growing frustration by the other characters in the game. It all ultimatly comes to an end when after the final date card display, Charlie is in her new office reading congratulation emails for her new business. A new funeral home focused on natural burials and the encouragment of home viewings.

The game is very, very story driven, as my brother has informed me most visual novels are, and is very good at pulling you in to the story. Between the different reactions of the funeral goers and the no nonsense approach the game takes to preparing the bodies, there's really no way to pull away from the fact that these bodies were people. Whether their death was from old age or illness or suicide, you can really feel the care that the creaters had put into keeping the tone from going dark or negative to it all.

I've been to quite a bit of funerals over the years and had even debated studying mortuary sciences myself. The subject of the game wasn't a new concept to me. What it was was a very honest look at the funeral business and what it entails to be a funeral director.

Was every single detail correct? Probably not.

Was the game's story believable? Yes, it was.