What Comes After the wholesome end?
Content warning: suicide, death.
(Disclaimer: I’m listed in the “Special Thanks” section of the credits for reporting a bug right after its initial release. I’m not involved with its development otherwise.)
In recent years, a category of (predominantly indie) videogames, has significantly grown in popularity: wholesome games. There is no hard definition of what constitutes a wholesome game, but a few characteristics seem to be prevalent:
The aesthetics of the game appear soft and colorful, favoring stylized depictions over realism.
The character designs are “friendly” and rather cute. Even antagonists are “evil” only by that game world’s standards and not particularly unsettling.
(Sentient) animals appear as characters, whether they are anthropomorphic or feral. Cats, dogs, and frogs are among the most common, and if there are dogs, chances are you will be able to pet them.
Violence, if there is any, is cartoonish and slapstick.
The player’s objective is harmless and relaxing. Instead of fighting enemies, there are tasks such as managing a business (like a farm, café, or restaurant) or helping NPCs with their problems. Conflict is resolved through dialog, minigames, or puzzles instead of violent confrontations.
Darker topics such as death, abuse, or discrimination rarely appear and are at most hinted at or treated abstractly. If the developers express any hateful speech within their game, its status as wholesome might be questioned or revoked.
Some games that would be classified as wholesome under those criteria are A Short Hike (adamgryu, 2019), Calico (Peachy Keen Games, 2020), Here Comes Niko! (Frog Vibes, 2021), or Unpacking (Witch Beam, 2020). Bigger budget titles that would fall within the same criteria include the Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing series.
However, there are exceptions where games try to remain wholesome while dealing with more somber themes. What Comes After (Rolling Glory Jam/Fahmitsu/Pikselnesia, 2020) tells the story of a protagonist struggling with suicidal ideation, while seemingly ticking every other wholesomeness checkbox. By navigating the protagonist through her troubles, the game wants to help players with similar mental health issues overcome them. But despite its admirable goals, simply wrapping unpleasant issues in a pleasant, encouraging presentation only highlights the wholesome aesthetic’s limitations at addressing serious topics.
Vivi on her Friday evening commute at the start of the game
The game starts with Vivi, our protagonist, timidly navigating through a train on her journey back home from work. After falling asleep, she notices that the train she was on became a vehicle that transports the deceased to the afterlife. Realizing she might be dead, Vivi briefly feels relief and mentions her suicidality, before her response changes to a more remorseful one, expressing concern for her mother and those on the train who experienced her death. Soon afterwards, she meets the conductor who takes on the role of a modern-age Charon, guiding the passengers on their journey to the afterlife, and who informs Vivi of the final destination. However, both realize that her time has not yet come, so Vivi – now relieved that she isn’t dead – is left to explore the train to pass the time until she can return to the land of the living.
Aesthetically, the game’s hand-drawn graphics create an appropriately mellow, dreamlike atmosphere. The gameplay is limited to moving left and right, talking to the numerous passengers, and occasionally stopping to pet a ghost animal. While talking to all key NPCs results in the “good ending”, the overall experience is highly linear and more narrative than interactive. Speaking to the ghostly passengers shows that death comes in a variety of forms, with your fellow travelers recalling the story of their death (or at least hinting at it). Denial and acceptance, sorrow and hope, remorse and vindication, misfortune and intention - all make their way into the game’s mostly brief dialogs, usually followed by a few words of advice along the lines of “choose life”, “live your life to the fullest,” and similarly shallow variations of “don’t die.”
The other passengers share their stories and follow up with short advice.
Despite the emphasis on death the overall tone of the game remains fairly uplifting, which is not too surprising when looking at the dev team’s prior games. Considering that the late Mohammad “Fahmitsu” Fahmi (design, writing and directing) has previously worked on Coffee Talk (Toge Productions, 2020), and that developer studio Rolling Glory Jam released Rage in Peace (2018) two years earlier, it’s not hard to see What Comes After as them combining the coziness of the former and the omnipresence of death in the latter.
But for all the references to death and dying, neither of the two possible endings has the protagonist give in – suicide is not an option, literally. In the bad ending, the player prematurely guides Vivi to a seat and watches her fall asleep for five minutes while not pressing any keys. Vivi wakes up in her world again and a train worker informs her that she had just been alone for a few hours. She exits the train, and a simple fade to white brings us back to the main menu.
In the good ending, the protagonist is reminded of positive experiences in her past and memories of her loving family. Her feelings of worthlessness and suicidal ideation that had been established early on disappear by remembering eating her favorite meal. Soon afterwards, she is happy to have escaped the train and embraces her regained life with joy, going so far as to adopt a litter of stray kittens. Despite not directly exploring a “what if I died or had never lived?” scenario, the good ending is reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol in its moral: embrace life, do not give in to sorrow, appreciate the good things around you even when they’re hard to achieve.
Sending such a message undoubtedly comes with the best of intentions, but What Comes After’s unfettered optimism simplifies suicidal ideation as simply a momentary sadness. Vivi’s issues are resolved by being reminded of how supportive her family is. In real life, mental health issues are obviously a lot more complex. Reassurance may help with fleeting thoughts of worthlessness, but it cannot address deeper-lying issues that may have caused a distorted sense of the self in the first place, let alone negative family experiences. Suffice to say, suicidal tendencies require even more time and effort in their treatment. Yet, within the first few minutes of the game, the protagonist is happy to hear she hasn’t died yet, and even the bad ending suggests she’s relieved to be back in the world of the living again.
Not all passengers are human.
It would be unfair to expect What Comes After to be a playable therapy session, applicable to any mental health issues from lowered self-esteem to suicidality. That’s a standard that has never been achieved by video games nor any other medium, from “inspirational” self-help videos to academic literature. If solving these issues was as simple as completing a game in less than an hour, the mental health crisis that numerous countries face today would not exist. But as What Comes After addresses these issues and suggests a solution (even advertising itself on the Steam page as “a personal journey of learning how to love yourself”), it is worth discussing how media can meaningfully talk about mental health, analyze whether this attempt can be considered successful, and where its limitations lie.
During the pandemic that dominated much of the news cycle of the last two years, fears of death and an overall sense of doom have been overwhelming and likely influenced the development of What Comes After (most notably with the facemask-wearing passengers). As the global death toll rose and people around the world suffered from its consequences, it is understandable and somewhat noble if the developers wanted to give back a piece of positivity to this world. Handling death, a topic that is still considered taboo in many societies, in a very accessible way does deserve recognition, but in its accessibility and wholesome presentation may also lie its greatest weakness.
As suffering from disorders and diseases is by definition unwholesome, the wholesome way to approach the topic necessarily focuses on overcoming them. The symptoms are only relevant if they recede; the struggle can only be portrayed if a triumph stands at the end. For an emotional and narrative impact, it has to be no less than a triumph, impressive in both speed and significance. Getting better in real life is a long and often non-linear process, full of minor improvements and frequent setbacks. In What Comes After, the gameplay couldn’t be any more linear and is guided by supernatural experiences that fast-track the process.
Healing can indeed be wholesome, which may at first hand make such an aesthetic and concept a good fit. But if the result of such a process is wholesome, this implies that the starting point of that process has to be less wholesome. Yet, this is not the case. The art style isn’t anything less than cozy throughout the game, the colors remain soft and the characters adorable. Within the narrative, there is change. Within the game world, there is almost none. The journey towards a wholesome goal, loving yourself, has been wholesome from the start. From the trailers to the intro , to even the worst obtainable ending, everything is wholesome.
Meals and memories served in the dining car.
That’s not to say heavy topics couldn’t be handled with such an aesthetic. What Comes After is not the first stylistically wholesome game that focuses on the process of dying. Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games, 2020) explores a conceptually similar journey-to-the-world-of-the-dead setting, but with the player in charge of helping the deceased reach their final destination, and saying goodbye. Rakuen (Laura Shigihara, 2017) features a little boy with terminal cancer as a protagonist who alleviates the pain of his fellow hospital patients by escaping into the colorful fantasy worlds that eventually become his afterlife. What separates both games from What Comes After, however, is that they don’t hide that the goal is to care about others. The quests/missions/levels start with a troubled NPC in a certain situation and the player’s goal is to change their situation by helping them. The player, acting through the protagonist, cares for them.
What Comes After, by contrast, aims to have the player care for themselves, even loving themselves as a result of overcoming mental health issues. The stated purpose is feeling good about yourself, not others. One character even notes that Vivi lacks self-love and that her troubles stem from it. But ironically, embracing her life is still down to not wanting to disappoint or bother others. As such, the player helps Vivi help others, but self-love – independent of being useful to others – finds little space in a healing experience that could be transferred to the player. While altruism is often seen as a virtue, focusing too much on helping others may even exacerbate mental health issues such as guilt or depression (Oakley: 10410-10411). In fact, empathy-based guilt, concern for the well-being of others and the desire to help is more pronounced in depressed individuals, often to the point of their own detriment, despite them sometimes being described (or describing themselves) as selfish (O’Connor et al.: 49-70).
How could such a transfer be accomplished with a similar aesthetic? Perhaps Celeste (Extremely OK Games, 2018) would be a good example. While more symbolic and less explicit in its themes, Celeste’s mountain-climbing still serves as a metaphor for overcoming inner demons. The game’s increasing difficulty makes the player struggle just as the protagonist does, but progress feels satisfying and highlights the importance of not giving up. While there are other characters along the journey, reaching the peak is still a task done for the protagonist, not others. Given the multitude of players and their diverse individual struggles, perhaps such an abstract approach would be the most promising. Especially considering the tendency to avoid deeper-sitting conflicts and too upsetting themes in wholesome games.
Even if helping players learn to love themselves is a claim that I wouldn’t say What Comes After quite lives up to, the concept of purposefully helping players with mental health issues through video games is an interesting one. And tackling those issues in more games may at the very least help with identifying what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps, videogames can indeed one day be a reliable therapeutic tool.
Until then, let us not conflate the heart-warming with the life-changing.
References
Oakley, Barbara A. “Concepts and Implications of Altruism Bias and Pathological Altruism.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110 Suppl 2, 2013, pp. 10408–15. doi:10.1073/pnas.1302547110.
O'Connor, Lynn E., et al. “Empathy and Depression: The Moral System on Overdrive.” Empathy in Mental Illness, edited by Tom F. D. Farrow and Peter W. R. Woodruff, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 49–75.
Fricochet (she/her) is a composer and game dev. You can find her on itch, Bandcamp, and Twitter @fricotweets.
If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing it with a friend. If you'd like to help keep the lights on you can support the site on Ko-Fi.