The Graveyard
Developer: Tale of Tales
Nomination: Innovation Award
Platform: Windows, Mac
Website
Description: You accompany an old woman on a visit to a graveyard. Selected by Indecade and the European Innovative Games Award.

Adam’s Thoughts:
Art is more meaningful when you bring something to it and it gives you something back. That’s sort of the point of The Graveyard. Interaction is very limited–all you can really do is walk, sit, and think. In fact, developer Tale of Tales outright says that the game is more like an interactive portrait than a traditional game. You could probably make the argument that it’s a roleplaying game in the purest sense, because playing the role of an old woman who visits a cemetery is all you can really do.

The Graveyard asks whether objectives define gaming, and seems to answer no. It’s the flip side to achievements and mechanics, opting instead to emphasize experience and the story told by the player’s agency. There’s an odd discordance to it, though. For a game that you’d think would value immersion, it makes the odd design choice of using character-relative controls–pressing the right arrow key makes you turn clockwise, and if you’re thinking about whether that means you’ll be walking right or left, you’re already out of the moment. Worse is the fact that there’s a paid version of the game where the only difference is that the old woman can die. The prospect of paying $5 to watch an old woman die has an unsavory snuff film feel that overshadows any artistic point the game tries to make. Ultimately, The Graveyard feels like a novelty: it’s perhaps an interesting idea, but it pales quickly.

Katie’s Thoughts:
In The Graveyard, you walk an old woman to through a graveyard to a bench, listen to a song about some of the people in the graveyard, and walk out again. Yep. You sure do.

It feels very much like the people at Tale of Tales have been personally very moved and touched by death, and reached out to express their feelings. Perhaps the meaninglessness of your agency in the game is supposed to be a reminder that we all die, no matter what we do (see Passage). But what they have done instead is created a game that is better experienced as a video, because you don’t break immersion worrying about the controls. Tale of Tales has even provided a trailer, which is in fact a video the entire game. The Graveyard makes an interesting short film, but isn’t really a game.

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