I’m a big fan of Fellow Traveller. The indie company publishes many of my favourite games, including my all-time number one,Citizen Sleeper, so I always keep an eye on its upcoming roster for my latest fix of narrative goodness. As such, I was keen to try outPine: A Story of Loss.
I quickly found myself chopping wood in a quiet forest. And I enjoyed it. The solitude, the thunk of axe on log, the simplicity. I liked it mechanically, too, as Pine makes you trace the route of the axe through the air with your mouse in order to chop. It’s only a little bit more involved than pressing a button on your controller, but it really sells the idea of what you’re doing.
Soon, I’d felled a tree and broken it down into manageable chunks. I carried it back to my cottage in a wheelbarrow, and was hit with a flashback. Our lonely lumberjack used to scour the forest with his wife. They collected pine cones together, frolicked among the trees, and generally had a heartwarming time among the pines.
She’s dead now. This isn’t a spoiler, it’s the basic premise of the game. It’s something you gather from the title alone, the Steam description, theone image of a mourning lumberjackthat kickstarted the whole idea for this game. But none of that prepares you for how Pine handles grief.
The gameplay is incredibly simple. You collect water. You water your vegetable garden. You chop wood. You cut grass to repair your thatched roof. You sleep. You start again. Each action is simply but beautifully animated, and accompanied by an appropriate action with your mouse. You don’t have to think about anything, mechanically speaking, but that gives your brain space to explore the mundanity of life after loss.
The prosaic routine is the point. Our lumberjack protagonist hasn’t come to terms with the loss of his beloved, he hasn’t gone to therapy or tried to live his life how she would have wanted like the rest of us do in the wake of such awful incidence. He’s still as raw as the crops he waters, his wound as jagged as the axe cuts in the wood he chops. Without saying a word, Pine immediately brings the lumberjack’s emotions to the surface of his story.
The demo reminded me of losing my best friend. We were 23, and he was in a freak accident. I barely remember anything from the next year of my life. My family tells me I wasn’t particularly nice to be around, and I’m astonished I graduated university at all with my head a complete wreck.
I got lost in my daily routine. I went to work, I attended classes, I presumably took part in enough social activities so that people didn’t worry, but I don’t know what they were. I may as well have been chopping wood alone in the forest. Maybe I would have preferred that, away from the constant reminders in the house we once shared. Maybe we should have swapped places, this fictional lumberjack and I, so we could both escape the ghosts that haunted us.
I’ve played plenty of games that deal with loss, some better than others.Before Your Eyesis one of the best games I’ve ever played due to how it weaves in its blinking mechanic with an emotional story. I’ve also mourned plenty of characters in RPGs who have been so well characterised that I feel gutted when they’re taken from me. But no game has ever mirrored my own experience of loss so profoundly as Pine.
Maybe I was a little naive here, but I didn’t expect this game to affect me so much. I didn’t cry, but I felt introspective. Long-buried memories resurfaced, not unwanted but certainly unexpected. I’m happy to say I’m in a good place now, seven years on, but for a long time I wasn’t. While therapy helped me get back to myself, I had always wondered if my experience of grief was singular, unique. Now, thanks to an illustrated lumberjack, I know it’s not.
