Content warning for discussions of mental health, suicide
Goodbye World, by Yo Fujii, first caught my attention during last year’s Day of the Devs press conference. It was one of a handful of games shown off during the conference’s small segment on indie games making their way from Japan to the rest of the world, and I was immediately taken in by its aesthetic and subject matter. After playing it, I can report that it’s a neat little game with things to say about game development and the way we choose to value some forms of labor over others, but ultimately it’s very surface-level.
The game centers around two game developers, Kanii (the programmer and game designer) and Kumade (the writer and artist) as they navigate the difficulties of making a commercially successful and artistically fulfilling video game. We see the pair at various points in their working relationship, from the moment they met in college, to the time they won a game design award, to the point where they decide to start their own studio and beyond. Interspersed between these vignettes are levels to Kanii’s game, Blocks, a Super Mario Bros. and Kirby-inspired “Game Boy game” that features a little guy who can break and re-set blocks to overcome obstacles and squash enemies.
At the start of each scene (there are 13 scenes in total), you play a level of Blocks either to its completion or until you run out of lives — and it is not an easy platformer. While it wears its inspirations directly on its sleeve, most of the levels are needlessly obtuse and you can tell (within the fiction) it’s a project made by someone who hasn’t had the time or experience yet to really fully optimize the game. I found myself intentionally dying at a couple of points just to get to the narrative aspect of Goodbye World.
This is I think intentional, as the core conflict at the heart of the game is between Kanii and… everyone else. In a word, Kanii is portrayed as standoffish, cold and slow to make a decision to people she comes in contact with, whether it be the artist who worked with her in college before Kumade, her boss at the part time job she picks up, the publisher who ultimately turns her game down, and even Kumade herself.
Here, however, Goodbye World remains sympathetic by showing the inner turmoil broiling within Kanii. She clashes with her old artist because that artist refuses to perform work as agreed. She quits her part time job because her boss berates her for the act of making a video game. When she tries and fails to get her game published, it’s because the publisher tells her that what she made ultimately wasn’t worth making, from a business perspective. And even when we see Kanii and Kumade go their separate ways, it’s not because Kanii has necessarily done anything wrong: she just can’t answer some of the questions at the heart of the game. Why do you make video games? What compels you to keep doing this?
I know next to nothing about game development, but everything I do know informs me that it is hard as shit. You don’t get up one morning, snap your fingers and “make a game.” And even if you do make a game, there’s no guarantee of its success, either critically or commercially. Kanii and Kumade win a national collegiate game design competition, and that translated into… nothing. A history of successive game development that we don’t see is apparently a history of games that nobody wants to play. Kanii vacillates between wanting to make games for herself because she wants to and obsessing over the qualities that make a “bestselling” game. When Kumade finally leaves their two-person studio, it’s after she asks Kanii: “do you remember your promise?” The promise in question: will you quit when it’s no longer fun or feasible to make games?
And the answer is no.
And like, we could judge Kanii for exacerbating her own burnout, sure. But who among us hasn’t sunk dozens or hundreds of hours into something only for it not to pan out? Who hasn’t been unhealthy in the past about their relationship to their work, or their “work?” It shouldn’t be this way, and every step away from that reality is a good step, but let’s not kid ourselves. And we could judge everyone else in the game for making Kanii’s life worse, for not facilitating her game design dream, for not supporting her, but… life is usually more complex from that perspective as well. I think Goodbye World does a good job of exploring this.
The one aspect of Goodbye World I genuinely did not like was the ending. I’m going to have to spoil this, so turn away if you don’t want to read.
In the last two scenes of the game, Kanii reaches out to Kumade one last time, asking her to visit and take a look at the game she made. Kumade, now working a full-time job, sets a date when she isn’t scheduled, but one of her coworkers calls out sick and she covers for them, having to take a rain check. This seems to be the last straw for Kanii. One moment, she’s sitting at her workplace desk. The next, her balcony door is open and she’s nowhere to be seen.
Kumade eventually goes to the studio when Kanii doesn’t pick up the phone or answer texts. She finds the finished version of Blocks in the Game Boy on the desk, and the final stage, which we play, serves as a, well, “Goodbye World” note to Kumade and to the player.
And this by itself is not the problem. Suicide as a way of ending a narrative is not necessarily the most creative thing in the world, but if done well, if done with respect to the character and sensitivity toward the reader/player/viewer, it’s absolutely a valid way to do things. But Goodbye World pulls this punch entirely. Right before the credits roll, we get one last line from Kanii: “Why did you make it sound like I died?” One last joke, goof, misdirection caused by the in-fiction dev team’s immaturity. It felt cheap and left a bad taste in my mouth. I actually put my Steam Deck down and said “come on, man” out loud.
Goodbye World wasn’t confident enough in its own narrative choices to make that ending land. I think that ended up damaging the rest of the game’s arguments, for me personally. To do something like kill off the character whose perspective we shared for an hour and then go “haha jk you weren’t upset were you? because that would be LAME” just kinda sucks.
There are games out there that explore the questions and situations surrounding game dev and work-life balance and following your passion that pop up in Goodbye World without being Like This. I hope that Yo Fujii keeps making stuff, though.