I found A Mortician’s Tale to be more of an interactive educational tool than a game. The game part is the peanut-butter surrounding the gamer-pill of “learning about the death industry”. What gameplay there is mostly consists of reading (very engaging) emails on your office PC and playing little minigames (it reminded me of those awful “Elsa foot surgery” type flash games but I feel bad making that comparison) to prepare bodies for their funerals/burial. It’s honestly more to walk you through the process of embalming a person than it is to be gameplay but it serves it’s purpose.
I learned a ton of stuff about death and morticianing from this game that I never would have ever thought to ask about. Probably not until I had to help arrange a funeral myself. I think that’s what this game is trying to accomplish - getting people to think about death in a more constructive way in advance of having to do it all while also grieving - and it definitely succeeds at that. I definitely feel more informed now, like I didn’t even know a lot of the funeral/burial methods it mentions were Things You Could Do. The plot touches not just on what the death industry does but also what the death industry is like, and deals with some pretty serious themes around the ethics of how people are treated after they die and how funeral homes can exploit grief to upsell people. Definitely a horizon-broadener of a game. Go play it because it’s cheap and takes like an hour total to play through.
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