Beautiful, Small Experiences Amidst Grief and Pine: A Story of Loss
Have you ever found yourself trapped in a memory? I don’t mean just remembering a moment, but those especially vivid spells when your senses betray you and impossible apparitions reappear. Ghosts begging the mind to revisit its dark corners. Depending on the life you have lived, losing yourself like this can see you viscerally re-experience moments as warm as summer’s light on your back or as cold as winter’s grasp at your throat.
Pine: A Story of Loss is described as a “single-serving” game, which is an apt bit of nomenclature (though I do wish our industry had something more standard with which to describe these experiences). In the span of roughly an hour and a half, you watch and very lightly control the actions of a woodworker living in a secluded glade somewhere within a coniferous forest, mourning his wife. It lacks a sense of true place, but I believe this choice serves the narrative. It could happen anywhere, it could be anyone.
Artistically, Pine chooses to forego dialogue entirely. This is fitting, considering our protagonist is now living alone in his small cottage, but it extends even into his memories of the woman with whom he shared an intimate and sacred love.
Love is a tricky thing. Much of our media tells stories of love, even of losing what once was had. “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” But when one experiences loss, specifically the death of a loved one, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that Shakespeare was full of it. Pine opens with a similar quote from Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent: “It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
The game presents a series of repetitive sequences and simple puzzles that break up what is largely watching a man go about basic survival. The woodworker harvests from his garden, prepares thatching to repair his roof later in the year, and gathers water. These tasks, which change slightly with each of the four seasons the player experiences, ultimately bring to bear the harrowing reality of living with grief. It’s easy to disassociate. To go through the motions.
The player is often given a choice of three tasks at the beginning of a day. Occasionally, the woodworker sees his wife’s image in the smallest of places: a heart they carved into a nearby tree, a wind chime they crafted together, a caterpillar crawling through the garden. These moments, invariably, lead him silently into memory. The lighting shifts into something brighter, the ambient score that carries throughout the entire piece follows suit, and a mini-game brings the player and woodworker into a more pleasant gameplay experience. We solve a puzzle in the garden, we do a call-and-response rhythm section–these moments that bring to mind lighter fare from other games we have played.
And then, inevitably, the woodworker and the player are left to recognize these moments are past. They have come and gone. The life he once lived happily in this glade with his wife is now a spectre haunting him at every possible turn. Early on, the woodworker begins to channel these feelings of spectacularly heavy grief into whittling. He creates beautiful wooden sculptures of his love and decorates his sparse home with them, slowly bringing more life into its simple space as the year goes on.
The earliest question I had during my time with Pine was this: Why is this a video game? I wanted to understand why the creative team chose this medium to tell this story. The animation on display is simple, but consistent and effective. Specifically, the framing of shots is so wonderfully done that I felt it prudent to wonder why this project wasn’t an animated film. It took reaching the end of the game to find a satisfactory answer. Namely, it is that the act of the player’s influence over the woodworker is critical to his emotional growth. This is clearest in a specific moment that I do not wish to spoil, but I was left feeling like I was the nagging voice in the back of this man’s head bringing him regretfully to the present. In a way, I felt guilty about this truth.
The game only presents the player with one “choice,” which makes this connection with the woodworker most apparent, though it isn’t a choice at all. Playing it one way continues the story, while playing it the other leads to a quiet “false” ending and a replay of the scene so that it may be done “right” this time. I think this is the only flaw I saw in the piece. It challenges the player to consider grief and silently guides them through how it affects this specific man, but has a concrete narrative to convey in its short runtime.
But truly, “not giving me enough agency” isn’t exactly the most damning critique of an experience of this scope. Pine is not a harrowing tale of a sad father trying to connect with an estranged child. It is not an open, option-filled quest to find one man’s identity after losing the people who made him who he is. It is quiet and beautiful. It is small and intimate. Pine, much like the trees from which it takes its name, brings the bitter taste of needles alongside its sweet smells.
You never know when grief will come. The way you handle it can be similarly unpredictable. But as time passes, as you become accustomed to its visitations, grief can become more than a period of weakness. It becomes reflective, celebratory even. We grieve those we love because we loved them. We had something so special that it is worth constantly remembering its absence. Though in the dark moments of grief’s earliest days this is no comfort, it is something human that we all experience at one point or another. Pine: A Story of Loss is a beautiful representation of the universal truth that there is light within any darkness, though sometimes it is difficult to see due to the absence of the brightness to which we are accustomed.
Though Steinbeck may disagree, I believe the woodworker and I are on the same page.
