Closer The Distance Review (XSX)

Closer the Distance feels like a depressing Sunday night BBC drama about a struggling coastal community dealing with the fallout of a young member of their close-knit community dying in a tragic accident.

I mean it feels like it because that’s what it is, in game form, and a testament to how well games can tackle hard-hitting subjects if they’re given the chance.

Closer the Distance opens with a family being informed that their daughter Angie has been killed in a car accident.

You’re then left to watch the fall out of this news, her mother Pia is in denial, and her father Axel is in shock, but her sister Connie feels that Angie is still there guiding her actions.

It’s a stark opening and one that does a great job of showing how grief can tear a family and then a community apart or bring it together as the news of Angie’s death spread to the corners of Yesterby, the tight-knit coastal village she once called home.

It also turns out Connie, was right, as the game essentially takes the ethereal management aspects of a life sim and turns them into a character all of their own, as players take on the role of the recently deceased Angie as she influences and guides the actions of the townsfolk as they deal with their own personal and collective sense of loss.

Much like The Sims, each character has their own goals, desires, and basic needs like eating and sleeping. At any time you can check in on a character to see what they’re doing and the game will pause if there’s a scene that informs the overarching plot, or a task is about to be completed.

The characters you can control expand as the weeks turn to months from just Angie’s Sister Connie, her boyfriend Zek, and eventually most of the village, as they all call on Angie for help or speak to her in their quieter moments of grief.

It’s a clever way of constructing the story and not overwhelming players as they get to grips with Closer The Distance systems, its increasingly complex narrative, and the myriad of small decisions that affect how characters interact with each other.

Who helps who? Does that negatively impact their relationship with their own family? What is going to help everyone move forward? It’s a minefield of actions and consequences and a reminder of how actions can have far-reaching effects you don’t necessarily realise at the time.

Much like real life, you can’t fix everything, and circumstances won’t always play out how you want them to even with the best intentions.

It’s a well-written narrative, and every character and interaction adds something new and vital to the story, which in turn helps inform your own decisions and how best to chart a course forward for the village.

Even the characters you don’t control have a life and vibrancy to them, and the village feels like it’s alive, regardless of your actions and sometimes it’s nice just to sit back and watch everyone go about their day.

Closer the Distance is a very meditative game and you spend a lot of time listening in on conversations and helping people with their grief.

It’s not the gamiest game, but it has a certain charm that kept me enthralled from start to finish.

Although the town is rendered in a fairly perfunctorily way and the characters are constructed in a way that you can impress your own emotions onto them and resemble the wood carvings laid on graves in the village, the voice acting and artwork used during each conversation is top tier and every member of the cast does a superb job of filling the void left by the somewhat vacant 3D models that wander around the village and imbuing them with a sense of urgency and life that their simplistic models often lack.

Final Thoughts

Closer the Distance is a raw and honest examination of the impact that grief has on everyone left behind after a tragic death.

It’s a well-written and clever life sim that feels like The Sims with a solid script and a lot of heart. It may have periods where there isn’t much to do, but it is ultimately a heartwarming, bittersweet tale of love, loss, and moving on.