MUSINGS: Why Harmony - The Fall of Reverie Is a Great Depiction of Grief

From personal experience…

Very recently, a friend of mine recommended me the video game Harmony: The Fall of Reverie (2023, from Don’t Nod), and it just so happened to be on sale for the holidays, so I grabbed it right away. Although the tutorial was simultaneously overly helpful and completely useless, the game itself was brilliant. It’s a story-based game that beautifully combines mysticism with real life, with the game’s primary antagonist being an allegory for companies like Amazon—stories that very much need telling right now. It’s an extremely complex and interesting story that I’ve only just begun to delve into as there are likely as many endings as there are Aspirations in Reverie. Yet, there’s one particular aspect of the game that they did so well that I feel compelled to talk about it immediately:

Grief

Warning: there will be spoilers for a significant plot point that occurs about midway through the game and its fallout!

So, to give a little bit of context to the game, here’s the premise: 

After learning that her mother, Ursula, has gone missing under strange circumstances, Polly returns to her home island of Atina to help find out what happened to her. There, she meets her mother’s primary partner, Laszlo, and his granddaughter, Nora. Laszlo is a beloved community figure, having been a nurse and then a bartender, a true local chap, friend to all. Nora is around 20 and is interested in activism. They catch up and she learns that there’s unsettling talk about a local corporation, MK, having slowly taken over the island over the last decade while Polly was away, with the government and police already under their thumb, while worker’s rights are going down the drain. 

At the same time, Polly finds a necklace that takes her to the land of Reverie, where she meets the Aspirations (human personifications of certain things like chaos, glory, power, etc.; not unlike Neil Gaimain’s gods in his various works). She learns that she is the new clairvoyant oracle and is charged with keeping balance between her world and Reverie, having inherited the title from her mother, who lost it years prior. At the start of the game, Reverie is not in great condition and needs a new heart. 

Gameplay-wise, this just means that when you make an in-game choice, you’ve got a limited ability to see where that’s going to lead you in the future. Taking certain paths will open and remove options from you as you proceed.

Now, as the story goes, the characters learn that the problems in Reverie are directly linked to MK’s takeover of Atina. They find Ursula and learn more about what’s gone wrong in the connection between the two worlds, and come up with a plan to rectify it. At the same time, an ally starts a public campaign about MK’s corruption. They are able to sever MK’s connection to Reverie during a public uprising.

And, to get to the point of this article, during this uprising, Laszlo is killed. 

At this point in the game, the player has become pretty familiar with the family dynamics, no matter what path they’ve taken or who they’ve most supported. Each of the characters has their own things that they care about and believe in. They don’t always align with one other either, but there’s a definite push towards the importance of the bonds of family in the game (and the game is extremely open-minded with what it refers to as family, which I love, by the way). 

Polly’s clairvoyance shows her possible outcomes for the future, but it does not ever predict this death. As such, this loss completely destroys her and is magnificently portrayed in the game’s mechanics: the multiple choices she sees in front of her become limited to “get out of bed,” “take a shower,” and “eat something.” The path forward becomes a straight line of basic functions with no other choices or options. She becomes bitter at the Aspirations and Reverie… “What’s the point of being clairvoyant if I can’t prevent the death of a loved one?” 

Laszlo’s face becomes that of the revolt in Atina as things escalate, which makes healing very hard for the family. Nora and Ursula agree that they hate the way his face has been painted all over the town, even though they’re both on the side of the cause it’s supporting. It’s interfering with their ability to process and deal with his death, and they feel like they’re not getting the time they need.

Meanwhile, Polly is spiraling with a combination of survivor and savior syndromes. She feels that her choices led to Laszlo’s death, despite her ability to see the outcomes of her choices to a degree. The unbiased truth of that, however, is that the choices that could have prevented Laszlo’s death were not available on the tree, at all. This means that, despite Polly’s insistence of her fault… it was literally something completely out of her control. There was no choice she could have made, no path she could have taken, to stop his death from happening. 

I think a lot of people need to be reminded of that, and no one more regularly than myself.

When it comes to the prevention of loss, no one knows better than me how easily it is to feel at fault. I’ve never allowed myself to engage too deeply in these thoughts because I know they aren’t productive, but they pop up every once in a while and I still need to feel them out, even if they’re untrue. 

Imagine someone gets mad at you in a misunderstanding, and they get so upset that they overdose on drugs and die… it’s hard to not feel guilty, like you caused that death. It’s hard to not spend the rest of your life thinking, if I had only just said or done this differently, they’d still be here. However, those thoughts are unintentionally arrogant. Chances are, the road to that death was considerably more complex than one relationship and that there were multiple other things completely out of our control that also helped steer things to their final end. It’s more than likely that losses like these are completely unpreventable and beating ourselves up over them is, in the end, just a way to hurt someone (ourselves) because we are hurting over a loss. 

I was fortunate to be quirky enough to take a very objective look at my loss when it hit me, because I was so devastated that I knew that if I didn’t take control of my grief, it would easily consume and destroy me. I made sure that I was grieving how I wanted, when I wanted, and with whom I wanted. And I made sure that I was being objective about the situation, so that I was being fair to both of us. He was gone. There was no need for anyone to hurt even more than it was already going to hurt. It was already painful enough. 

This game shows me what I could have been, if I hadn’t had the foresight to keep watch over myself in this vulnerable time. To see Polly go to such a low, her path forward limited to survival functions, and the most complex decisions relating to which way to best blame herself for her loss… that very easily could have been me. 

What’s even more beautiful, however, is the options that eventually do become available. The different paths through grief for the various characters also beautifully portray the different ways in which people handle grief. Nora seeks solitude and peace so she can have time to process her thoughts and feelings. Ursula throws herself into activism in Laszlo’s name, keeping herself busy. Polly seems to shut down completely. In my game, I chose to pursue a relationship with her high school crush, so in the depths of her grief, my Polly allowed a beautiful bond to form with someone who constantly has her back during these hard times. 

I ultimately chose to let the town use Laszlo’s face as a symbol in the uprising, even though it was interfering with the family’s ability to grieve. My reasoning was to not let him die for nothing, and that revolutions need to strike when the iron is hot. The choices like this throughout the game are endless. There’s no right or wrong answer. Like in real life, most of the time you’re just doing your best with the information you have (and as mentioned, a lot of the times, certain choices will open up or close off other options indefinitely), based on the moral compass you’re trying to follow. In my case, I was mainly following Bond, Truth, and Chaos, though I was trying to stay balanced with a bit of everyone, as it makes sense that everyone has their uses and places in life. The game may be complicated, but so is life on that front, which is why this is such a brilliant depiction of it!

The game also has an extremely open and accepting narrative, without “shoving woke up the wazoo” as many big names are doing these days. It also nicely shows off the complexity of choice. Polly has a lot of options of who and what she can put her time into and sometimes the choices feel impossible to make. Sometimes knowing what’s right by your morals is like closing your eyes and spinning in a circle and picking the one in front of you when you open them. And those choices might have wildly unforeseen consequences. 

So, I really loved the depth that this game went into when exploring the choices we make in life and their long-running outcomes, as well as their extremely relatable portrayals of grief, magnificently reflected in the game mechanics. I very highly recommend it!