Dealing with Loss and Grief through Video Games

Grief is very personal, yet it is also one of life’s most universal experiences. All of us will lose someone we love, and we’ll all feel and express the pain of that loss differently. Some of us will tackle our grief head on, and some of us have to ignore it to focus on work or duty. Some of us will fall back on our beliefs to comfort and guide us. Some of us will let it fuel us, for better or worse. Some of us will be overwhelmed by it and deny it altogether. There are as many ways to grieve as there are people in the world, which naturally means there are as many stories to tell about grief as well.

As the most interactive and immersive way of consuming media, video games are perfect vehicles for conveying emotional stories. Controlling a character as they deal with their own loss can sometimes help us process our own. Here is a list of games that demonstrate just a few of the many ways that we experience grief.

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Gris (2018)

If there is a single game that proves that video games are the best medium for telling stories that move us, it’s Nomada Studio’s 2018 release Gris. Never mind the fact that its hand drawn art and vibrant watercolor palette make it one of the most visually striking games in recent memory. Never mind that its soundtrack whimsical, evocative, and moving or that its gameplay and puzzles are simple but engaging. Gris is exemplary because it perfectly relays its story completely without words.

There is no dialogue and no narration in the entire game. The only words that appear outside of the menu are tutorials to explain (in less than a handful of words, mind) how to activate each new ability. With every level, the game’s titular player character unlocks a new ability that represents a stage of her grief.

Regaining the Color

That’s what this story is about, navigating Gris through the grief that she feels. The game opens full of color with Gris singing and happy, but very quickly, everything falls apart. Her world literally crumbles beneath her feet, and as she falls, she loses her ability to sing. Every color is leeched out of her world. Gris stumbles her way through the first stage of the game (and her grief) in a world completely devoid of color and without her voice. At the end of each completed level, a color rejoins Gris’ world in a beautiful but chaotic spray, layering on top of previous colors and sometimes even overtaking them.

Like the colors, some of the levels themselves encroach on or lead back to previous ones. Gris’ journey is never straightforward; she isn’t suddenly free of one emotion just because she’s supposed to have moved past it. It’s such a moving depiction of what grieving feels like. Despite having clearly defined stages, we can find ourselves in the middle of any of them at any time. When all the color finally filters back into Gris’ life, when she regains her voice and can sing again, it’s not because she won the game but rather because she’s been able to work through her many emotions and accept her loss.

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God of War: Ragnarök (2022)

We see the immediate aftermath of the death of Kratos’ wife Faye at the beginning of God of War (2018), but it’s in Ragnarök that we really come to understand the effects that her death has on Kratos. The opening of the game, the very first thing we see, is Kratos sat in silence and solitude, clutching the pouch that held Faye’s ashes and overwhelmed with sadness. Christopher Judge’s motion capture work and Santa Monica Studios’ meticulous facial animations illustrate just how deeply Kratos is still mourning her death, despite the time that has passed since the events of the previous game. This quiet moment in the opening is the first time we’ve seen Kratos alone and without a looming crisis occupying his thoughts. It’s in this solitude that it seems Kratos truly allows himself to grieve.

In the 2018 game, he has a mission: to grant Faye’s final wish by scattering her ashes from the top of the highest peak in the realms and to make sure that their young son Atreus is prepared for that perilous journey. Considering the fact that there are less-than-benevolent gods on their tail the whole time whose intentions he can’t be certain of, Kratos doesn’t have time to feel his grief, let alone begin to process it. The urgency of his task doesn’t allow for it. Atreus even remarks at one point that it doesn’t seem like Kratos cares at all that Faye died, but Kratos has a job to do. He can’t let himself mourn the way Atreus likely expects him to. By the time Ragnarök occurs though, he and Atreus are (temporarily) out of crisis mode, and so the moments of quiet and solitude that he finally has are devoted to his grief.

Father and Son Tension

The tension between Kratos and Atreus during Ragnarök is a result of this grief because it causes Kratos to tighten the reins on his son. Any parent fears harm coming to their child, of course, but the recent loss of his wife is clearly making Kratos’ need to keep Atreus close much worse. He cannot lose Atreus the way he’s lost Faye; to do so would destroy him. But Atreus is doing what all young people do at his age — he’s testing his boundaries, trying to figure out who he is and what he’s meant to do. He’s slowly developing a life separate from Kratos, and the lack of freedom and trust that his father seems to have for him just makes him pull further away.

By the end of the game and the start of the Valhalla DLC, Kratos is in a better place. He’s repaired his relationship with his son and, it seems, settled with the loss of his wife. He’s even contending with his past and embarking on a brand new journey of his own, something he hadn’t believed possible for himself before. It’s through remembering Faye — the love that they shared and the lessons he learned from her — and communicating openly and honestly with those closest to him that Kratos is able to heal and to grow.

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Final Fantasy XV (2015)

Hoo boy, this Final Fantasy game is a doozy. Everyone in this game suffers, and no one is allowed the time or space needed to process their grief. When King Regis dies in an attack on the crown city of Insomnia, the game’s main character Noctis becomes the king of Lucis literally overnight — the ruler of an entire people at 20 years old. He still refuses to eat his vegetables, but here he is, suddenly responsible for a kingdom. There’s no time for him to get used to the idea though, and there’s no time for him to mourn his father’s death. He and his companions Prompto, Ignis, and Gladio have to amass enough power for him to be able to retake his kingdom, all while protecting him from the enemies out to kill him.

Not long after the fall of the capital city, the story’s antagonist Ardyn Izunia murder’s Lunafreya, Noctis’ childhood friend and his betrothed. Such a huge loss weighs heavy on him, especially after everything he’s already been through. It’s only worsened by the fact that the same chaos that gave Ardyn the chance to kill Lunafreya leaves Ignis injured and permanently blind. Noctis is so young and in so much pain, barely able to function, let alone lead.

The Power of Tough Love

The world needs saving though, and Noctis is the only one who can do it. Gladio, Noctis’ sworn and ever dutiful bodyguard, knows it. He snaps at Noctis, demands that he pull himself together and start doing his job. The tough love (and, wow, is it tough, this scene is painful to watch) puts a strain on the already tense relationship between the four young men. Eventually, it pushes Noctis to focus on his task but at the expense of his own healing.

Perhaps that’s why Noctis spends 10 years inside the Crystal at the end of the game. He needs the time to accept his eventual fate, but maybe he needs the time to finally grieve, too. For so long his mourning took a backseat to his obligation as king. This time, tucked away from the world, is the only chance he’ll have to come to terms with all he’s lost.

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Persona 5 Royal (2019)

Takuto Maruki is a wonderful character and a fascinating boss for the final semester of Persona 5 Royal. He serves as a mirror to the Phantom Thieves, forcing both the party and the player to contend with the idea that perhaps they’ve been in the wrong during the entire game.

Of course, Maruki’s conviction, his desire to rid the world from pain, stems from his own. In an effort to free his girlfriend from the trauma that plagued her, Maruki uses his newly discovered powers to erase her memory. In doing so, he also erases her memories of him, and the loss of her pains Maruki so much that it breaks him. Soon after, he decides that he’s going to use his powers to remake the world. He is too hurt to deal with his grief, so he convinces himself that instead, he’ll create a world devoid of pain in order to save everyone. His philosophy that people who are too hurt to face their problems should be allowed to forget them is really just an excuse for him to continue to deny that he’s devastated. He tells himself it’s for the greater good, but it’s just a distraction for himself.

A Second Chance

Ironically, it is one of the game’s other antagonists, Goro Akechi, who confronts Maruki about this, calling him self-righteous. Akechi shouldn’t be alive at all by this point — he sacrificed himself to save the Phantom Thieves towards the end of the base game. But Maruki has brought him back to eliminate a source of Joker’s pain and to give Akechi a second chance at life, one that Akechi vehemently rejects.

He argues that Maruki has made his choices meaningless by “freeing” him from the consequences of his actions and robbing him of his free will. No matter how much Maruki insists he’s doing so selflessly, Akechi counters that everything he’s done is to make himself feel better. When Maruki finally realizes that he’ll have to face his grief rather than run from it, he completely gives up. He is fully prepared to let himself die as his Palace crumbles around him, but Joker and the rest of the Phantom Thieves refuse to leave him behind. In the end, he’s ushered back to the real world where he’s forced to finally begin to deal with his pain.

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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024)

Loss is one of the prevailing themes of Final Fantasy VII (1997), so it makes sense that it would also feature as a major theme in its remake entries. In the trilogy’s second entry, released earlier this year, the themes of loss and grief really start to come into focus. A reoccurring saying in the game is that those who die “return to the Lifestream” where one day, those who’ve been left behind will be reunited with them.

That doesn’t really help Cloud though. Cloud Strife has experienced more trauma than just about every other character in this game, and his mental state reflects it. Cloud can’t process any of his grief; it’s too painful for him. So when his best friend and mentor Zack Fair dies in front of him, Cloud’s brain (with a bit of help from his debilitating case of mako poisoning, no doubt) literally rejects it. He erases it completely. He overwrites all memories of Zack with himself, forming the basis of his entire personality through the majority of the story.

In reality, Cloud was never a SOLDIER, just a basic Shinra trooper. He was never a mercenary; that was an idea that Zack brought up in passing while the two of them were running from the very same Shinra troops that ultimately gunned Zack down. Zack is the one who fought Sephiroth in the mako reactor in Nibelheim years before. And yet Cloud relays that story to the rest of the party with himself in Zack’s place, not out of a desire to take Zack’s glory for his own but because he truly doesn’t remember. Doing so would hurt too much. It’s like Cloud’s brain knew that any further trauma after everything he’d already been through would break him completely, so it overwrote reality with a new one to protect him.

A New Cloud over Aerith

Rebirth doubles down on Cloud’s tendency to deny the things that hurt him by turning what is arguably the story’s most important canon moment into something that many fans doubt happened at all. Because of the way that Square Enix is telling this new version of Final Fantasy VII’s story, no one can agree whether or not Aerith’s death actually happened. Some know that Sephiroth succeeded in trying to kill her, while others are sure that Cloud has managed to save her.

Just like Cloud himself is.

Once again, Cloud experiences a loss that he cannot handle, and he rejects it. He rewrites his memory of what happened and creates a new reality where he deflects Sephiroth’s blade. He buries his pain so deeply that he’s able to convince himself that no, actually, Aerith is completely fine. It’s obvious from the reactions of the rest of the party, however, that Aerith isn’t fine. That Cloud didn’t save her. She’s gone, and they’re all mourning her loss except for Cloud because for him, it hasn’t happened. He sees her; he even talks to her! Cloud has refused to accept another loss, and the impact of that will certainly be felt in the final game when he realizes that Aerith is really gone.

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We will all know loss and grief at some point in our lives, and learning what to do with the emotions that those things bring can be overwhelming. Stories can help us learn and help us grow, but games are particularly suited to helping us process our feelings because we push the analog sticks and press the buttons that move the main character through those same motions. There’s something about being in control of the character experiencing the loss and dealing with the grief that can help us better understand and process our own. And sometimes seeing a character grieve can give you permission to grieve as well.

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