How Can Video Games Guide Us Through Grief?

Grief is a universal human experience, yet it can still feel profoundly isolating. In a culture that often struggles to discuss death openly, we search for safe spaces to process loss, to understand its weight, and to remember. For many, whether you’re a parent of a young gamer or an adult who turns to games yourself, this search is increasingly leading to the screen. Video games offer a different kind of space: one that is interactive, narrative-driven, and controlled at your own pace. They don’t replace the profound work of therapy or the connection of support groups; instead, they offer a parallel, complementary path. This guide explores how games, as a unique and valid medium, provide a powerful and participatory form of emotional processing.

Jump to recommended games: Gentle & All-Ages │ Teen & Adult │ Related Games

Maybe you’re a parent like I am, and hearing “more video games” as a suggestion for a grieving child gives you some pause. In a world often wary of screen time, that idea might feel counterintuitive. But a new wave of poignant & beautifully crafted games has emerged, tackling themes of death, mourning, and memory with startling empathy. Forget the frantic button-mashing of the old days and think of these games more like “emotional toolkits” disguised as adventures. They’re built on a simple, powerful idea: when the real world feels too loud or painful, a quieter digital world can be a sanctuary for a hurting heart to explore, at its own pace, what it means to miss someone.

While engaging with these stories can sometimes feel heavy, there is immense value in processing grief through play. Play, after all, is often how children practice being human. What is so meaningful about processing through play is that it allows for agency, experimentation, and emotional distance when needed. They can pause, they can reflect, and they can engage with difficult emotions at their own pace, controlling the interaction in a way they often can’t in real life. In this light, video games are simply a more complex, interactive form of that same foundational play.

For younger players or those new to these themes, games can serve as a gentle introduction to complex emotions. For those with lived experience, they function as a form of narrative processing offering a structured space to externalize and process their own story.

It’s no coincidence that most of the groundbreaking titles below are primarily by independent game studios. These smaller teams operate with a different goal: not just to entertain but to connect and explore. This creative freedom allows them to take the artistic risks necessary to handle a subject as delicate as grief with the care, nuance, and authenticity it deserves. By doing those things, they end up creating experiences that resonate on a profoundly personal level.

In this spirit, the following games stand as testaments to the medium’s unique power. They are not escapes from grief but rather bridges.

A Gentle Reminder: Play with Compassion (For Yourself)

Before we explore the list, a crucial note: Games with heavy themes can be powerful tools, but it’s vital to check in with your child or yourself.  Is this feeling cathartic, like a necessary release, or is it currently feeling overwhelming and retraumatizing? It’s okay to:

• Pause the game, step away, take a breath, and have a glass of water.
• Play in shorter sessions so you can process a little at a time.
• Talk about it and share what you’re feeling with someone you trust.
• Stop playing. You are never obligated to finish a story that is harming your mental health.

The goal is processing and understanding, not punishment. Let your emotional well-being be the guide and stay close to yourself.

Not sure where to start? The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends asking the ‘5 C’s’ when evaluating any game: Who is your child? What’s the content? Does it help them stay calm or disrupt sleep? Is it crowding out homework, play, or rest? And are you keeping communication open? For a personalized approach, you can even create a free Family Media Plan.

The following guide curates games that explore themes of grief and loss, with suggestions grouped by general audience and emotional weight. An important reminder: emotional impact is subjective. Games listed as “lighter” emotionally can still land heavily on some kids, and deeply sad stories might be unexpectedly healing for others.

While this guide helps you find games that thoughtfully explore grief and loss, every child (and adult) processes emotions differently. Before introducing a game, take a few minutes to check independent reviews on sites like Common Sense Media (commonsensemedia.org). There, you can get a detailed “peek inside” the game including specific examples of language, violence, scary moments, and how mature themes are handled. That way, you can decide whether the game’s tone and content align with your child’s maturity level and your family’s boundaries. You know your child best.

Gentle & All-Ages Introductions (ESRB: E to E10+)

Ideal for younger players or those seeking a softer touch on themes of loss and memory.

• Apart of Me (E): Built as a gentle digital companion for bereaved youth, this game offers a quiet and safe world to process loss. Guided by a calming voice, players explore a soothing landscape, complete mindful mini-games, and listen to recorded stories from real people who have experienced grief. It was co-created by experts in child psychology and bereaved young people and translates bereavement counselling techniques into a magical 3D world.
• Cozy Grove (E): You’re a Spirit Scout on a haunted, ever-colorful island, helping ghostly bears find peace by fulfilling their final requests. The grief is wrapped in daily, manageable tasks, metaphorically speaking to how we carry memories and help stories find their end.
• The Last Campfire (E): A puzzle-adventure about embers trapped in gloom, seeking to return to their campfire. It’s a gentle allegory for hope, despair, and guiding others (or yourself) back to light.
• Pine Hearts (E): A short, gentle top-down adventure game that is set in a cozy campground. As you explore, you uncover mementos and flashbacks that piece together a story of a past vacation with a beloved father. The game’s core is about revisiting a place full of joyful memories to process absence, focusing on warmth, nostalgia, and the bittersweet comfort found in familiar places.
• Ori and the Blind Forest (E): A visually gorgeous platformer that wields its art to tell a universally resonant story about the ache of absence and the powerful light of connection. As Ori, a small spirit of light, you navigate this melancholic world, battling the manifestations of despair to restore balance. The core journey is about legacy and how the light Ori carries forward from a lost parent becomes the seed for new beginnings.
• Lost Words: Beyond the Page (E10+): Unique for its split narrative: one, a young girl’s diary about her grandmother’s illness; the other, a fantasy tale where words are powers. It directly links creative expression to processing real-world grief.
• Kena: Bridge of Spirits (E10+): Visually stunning, this action-adventure game casts you as a Spirit Guide helping troubled spirits move on. Some combat is present, but the core is compassionate problem-solving for the deceased.
• Mandagon (Unrated): This short free exploration game is a poem in pixel art form. Set in an interpretation of the Tibetan Bardo (the transitional state between death and rebirth), you play as a small stone mask drifting through floating ruins and serene landscapes. There is no danger, only peaceful platforming and environmental puzzles. The game conveys a profound sense of peaceful transition and explores themes of impermanence, legacy, and the quiet beauty of a soul’s journey afterlife. You can read more about the game here and learn more about the heart behind the game from the creator himself.
• Sesame Workshop’s Express Yourself Interactive Game (Unrated): Introducing the concept of death to a young child can be one of parenting’s most delicate tasks. Sesame Street’s bilingually available workshop, “When Families Grieve”/”Cuando Las Familias Sufren Una Pérdida,” offers a compassionate first step. It provides families with gentle, expert-vetted language and simple, interactive activities designed to build a foundation of understanding and emotional safety from which to navigate loss together.

Teen & Adult Narratives (ESRB: T to M)

Games with more complex, direct, and sometimes intense storylines. Recommended for teens and older.

Moderate Intensity

• Venba (T): A narrative cooking game about an Indian immigrant mother who is preserving her family’s recipes and stories. While focused on heritage, it poignantly touches on the grief of lost connections and the fear of fading memories.
• Gris (T): An absolutely breathtaking platformer without words. You play a girl processing a great sorrow, her world gaining color and new abilities as she moves through her grief.
• Hindsight (T): A narrative exploration game about a woman looking back on her life from childhood to adulthood, sifting through memories of her mother and her childhood home. It’s a quiet, reflective meditation on memory and loss.
• Arise: A Simple Story (T): You relive the key moments of a man’s life, from joy to profound loss, by manipulating time and the environment.
• Wylde Flowers (T): While this is primarily a cozy farming/life sim with witchcraft, a significant and tender subplot involves helping a central character process the loss of her husband. It’s woven naturally into the fabric of community support, showing how grief exists alongside daily life and new beginnings.
• A Story About My Uncle (T): In this first-person exploration game, you play through a story told to a child, swinging across vast caves and floating islands in a literalized search for a lost relative. It’s an exploration of the stories we build around absence, using breathtaking movement to give physical form to the emotional act of searching for someone who is gone.
• Crypt Custodian (T): Beyond its pixel-art charm and dungeon crawling lies a deeply reflective game about legacy. Playing as a feline spirit named Pluto, you are now on janitorial duty on a cosmic scale and are tasked with tidying the realms of the dead. Battling through dungeons, you uncover echoes of lives lived including their loves, regrets, and unfinished business. The game transforms the act of “cleaning up death” into a excavation of memory, asking players to gently sort through the complicated legacy of loss to find understanding.

High Intensity (Direct & Heavy Themes):

• Spiritfarer (T): The quintessential “cozy management game about death.” You ferry departed souls to the afterlife, building relationships, fulfilling last wishes, and learning their stories before the inevitable, heartfelt goodbye.
• What Remains of Edith Finch (T): Touching on generational trauma, this game is series of vignettes about the tragic, cursed Finch family. Each death is a playable memory, often whimsical and surreal, making you an active participant in the family’s legacy of grief and mystery.
• That Dragon, Cancer (T): This is less of a game and instead more of an interactive narrative poem created by parents about their young son’s terminal cancer. It’s a raw, faith-questioning, and uniquely devastating experience that places you inside their reality. *Please approach with significant self-care.
• To the Moon (T): A retro-style RPG about two doctors traversing a dying man’s memories to fulfill his last wish. It explores regret, the many different paths a life can take, and the healing power of reframing our stories.
• Rakuen (T): Created by Laura Shigihara (of “To the Moon” fame), you play a hospitalized boy who escapes with his mother to a fantasy world. To help his fellow patients and ultimately himself, he must solve their problems by exploring their pasts, dealing directly with illness, regret, and the hope for peace.
• Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (T): An adventure where you simultaneously control two brothers who embark on a quest to find a magical cure for their father’s illness simultaneously. Utilizing both joysticks, its core mechanic becomes one of the most profound metaphors for emotional dependence and carrying someone with you after they’re gone that gaming has ever produced. A beautiful story of grief told through two thumbs. *CW: Suicide
• Closer the Distance (T): In this choice-driven narrative, you return to your hometown after a tragic accident claims the life of a loved one. The game explores family dynamics, regret, and the process of mending fractured relationships in the shadow of sudden loss, focusing heavily on the “what went unsaid.”
• Pine: A Story of Loss (Unrated): Designed to be played in one sitting, this short narrative game follows a woodworker who is grieving the recent passing of his wife. Now alone in the glade where they once made their home, he attempts to move on.
• When the Past Was Around (Unrated): A wordless, short point-and-click puzzle game about a woman navigating the memories of a lost love whose life was cut short due to illness.
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (M): Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a dark fantasy RPG where death arrives by design, not accident, forcing its characters to live with an ever-present visible countdown. Set in a surreal, Belle Époque type inspired world, the game treats grief as a constant presence rather than a single event and it shapes every relationship and choice. NPR recently did a story with the game’s lead writer about how and why this game has become a breakout hit.

Processing Grief in “Non-Grief” Related Games

You might not always need a game explicitly about death to process grief. For many, the daily rhythms and achievable tasks of life simulators can offer a meaningful emotional reset.

• Stardew Valley (E): For someone grieving, the structured routine of watering crops and feeding animals can be a stabilizing force. Rebuilding a neglected farm can act as a powerful metaphor for rebuilding a life. The quiet, repetitive tasks can be meditative and a space where the mind can process while the hands are busy.
• Animal Crossing (E): This game provides control and consistent gentle friendship in a world that often feels out of control after a loss. You can create memorial spaces like a garden or even a room in your house to honor someone. The real-time clock also teaches a gentle, patient pace, mirroring the non-linear timeline of grief.
• Disney Dreamlight Valley (E): Here, the comfort comes from nostalgia and restorative tasks. Reuniting familiar characters and healing a valley of “The Forgetting” can feel symbolically powerful. It’s a game about reclaiming joy and memory from a creeping darkness, a task many grievers intimately understand.

Find Your Own Path, At Your Own Pace

The path through grief is as individual as a fingerprint, and so is the game that might help us walk it. Whether it offers a direct confrontation, a gentle metaphor, a side story, or pure wholesome distraction, each one holds potential for healing. These stories remind us that to mourn is to have loved something truly and deeply. Ultimately, these games return a crucial sense of agency that grief often steals. They remind us that while we can’t control loss, we can control how we engage with it. They remind us that we have the profound power to press start, to pause, and to continue when we are ready.

Games are just one path among many. We view them as a powerful part of a broader ecosystem of support. For many, healing is also found in the shared spaces of grief camps, the empathy of peer-to-peer support groups, or the guidance of a professional. If you are seeking personalized support in finding local or virtual programming, whether for yourself or a young person in your care, please reach out to us directly. We can offer guidance to connect you with the right resources.