A game about the five stages of grief.
Abyssal Blade · Vifer Games · Steam, 2024 · Narrative direction, worldbuilding, character arcs
How do you use game mechanics to make a player feel grief, rather than read about it?
Context
Abyssal Blade is a 2D pixel-art boss rush game released on Steam in 2024. I joined Vifer Games as Narrative Director, working with the developer to align the game's story with its mechanics. The game's central premise: each boss represents one of the five stages of grief.
The challenge: in most games, narrative is a layer on top of gameplay. In this one, the narrative needed to be the gameplay. A boss fight isn't "a boss fight, plus a cutscene about grief." It's a player physically enacting a stage of grief through the act of fighting, dying, retrying, and finally passing through.
The question we asked
Most games that deal with grief use dialogue to tell you how the character feels. We wanted to try something harder.
Could a game's mechanics — pacing, difficulty curves, win conditions, defeat states — themselves carry the emotional weight of grief, instead of relying on dialogue to do it?
What I did
- Developed the narrative arc across five bosses, each anchored to one stage of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
- Wrote character lore, worldbuilding, and thematic progression that aligned with the mechanical design.
- Collaborated with the developer to map narrative beats onto gameplay systems — which boss patterns evoke anger, which defeat screens evoke depression, what victory at the final boss should feel like.
What I learned
Mechanics can carry emotional weight if you let them. The "anger" boss didn't need an angry monologue — it needed a fight pattern that baited the player into aggressive play and punished it. The "acceptance" boss didn't need a final speech — it needed a different kind of victory condition.
This is the same skill I use in research: figuring out what a system enacts about people, beyond what it claims. A platform that says it values student wellbeing but makes mental health resources hard to find enacts something different than what it says. A game that says it's about grief but lets you breeze through enacts something different than what it claims. The interesting work is in the gap.
Links
Released on Steam, 2024. Approximately 2,000 sales. Play on Steam →
Marketing site I designed and built: abyssalblade.com →