Forever Ago Seeks Change in the Face of Death

Patrick Klepek (0:19)

I'm a total sucker for games that want to make me sad. Ever since the passing of my father, which is now many, many years ago, in the rearview mirror, so to speak, it just doesn't matter. The sappy commercials you see at the Super Bowl about parents dropping off their kids at school, it just doesn't matter. Like, something activated in my brain after that event, and I not only react that way to all sorts of media or even advertising the gestures in that direction, I actually seek out those stories because if I'm being perfectly honest, I find that the distance obviously makes things easier to deal with, but it's the distance that makes you forget, and I find stories about death and grieving to take me closer to those events, even as time has taken me further away from them, which is why after being surprisingly moved during a 15-minute demo at Summer Game Fest for the new game Forever Ago from Third Shift in Annapurna about an older man named Alfred who has lost his lifelong partner. No kids, really no personal friends to speak of. Alfred goes on this journey, a journey sort of directed by his wife. It's sort of a journal about their past and the life that they have lived, and trying to make sense of what you do in the after. Alfred is a complicated character.

Usually grief in video games is portrayed as sadness, if I was to put a simple word on it, but part of what I found so attractive of a television show like The Leftovers was how it channeled anger and anxiety and jealousy and didn't shame you as the audience or the characters in that show for having those feelings.

It's something I think people who are grieving don't really like to talk about. It's almost like you're not supposed to have those feelings. And I saw that in a show like The Leftovers as reflecting my own grieving process, you know, one that starts and really never ends. And I saw some of that in Forever Ago as well, in which Alfred is constantly lashing out at the people around him, people who are sometimes trying to help him and people who sometimes are just in the way as he goes through a process of grief that he cannot channel or really make sense of and instead he goes on this journey and the player goes on this journey to try and make sense of it. As a video game, there's not a lot you haven't seen here before. Emotionally, I do think there is some real uncharted territory here that I found very moving. And so for a game that's only a couple of hours long, I cannot help but recommend checking it out if that sounds like your sort of thing. And you want to know more about how it was made. Well, I am here to help. I recently had a chance to chat with the two co-founders of Third Shift. This is their first game. They worked in marketing and advertising before we get into all that and a lot more.

It's a chance to chat with Fabian Denter, the art director. Kind of, they're not formal titles. It's just like, I worked on art. I worked on writing, programming and UI. So in this case, Fabian worked on sort of everything visually in the game. And then Kai Bridges worked on writing, programming, UI. And it's not that the team was just them, but it was broadly just them. And they certainly make up a lot of the game that is Forever Ago. So as usual, there's an article up on the website about this conversation and some further thoughts about how I felt about the game. But do you want to listen to the conversation I had with them? Well, that's going to happen right now.

Where I want to start first is just to ask the two of you to describe what Forever Ago is. What is the game that, as we're speaking, is about to come out? For you, I'm sure, it's been in your head for a number of years as you've been working on it. But for people who aren't aware, how would you describe Forever Ago?

Kai Bridges (4:17)

Yeah, so Forever Ago is a narrative driven adventure game in which you get to play Alfred, who's on his journey to some sort of redemption, I would say. He lost his partner, basically, and he's now on a road trip.

Yeah, and he gets to meet quite a few people, also a dog, and works basically through his grief, in a way. Grief is different for everybody, and that's his way of going through it.