'Farewell, Good Night' Review: Determining the Worth of Lost Memories
A semi-autobiographical game about electroconvulsive therapy - and the memories it can take away.
Content Warning: Electroconvulsive Therapy
Your memories. Your feelings. Your principles. The things that bring you joy, the things that make you who you are. Across our lifetimes, we accumulate thousands of little building blocks that make up our unique selves, and it is a humbling experience to consider that not all of those blocks are load bearing. You may lose the memory of a favourite song, and still be yourself. You might lose the ability to find joy in 1000-piece puzzles, but still be yourself.
More painful than the possibility of losing those parts of yourself is the idea that you have to decide which of them are essential, and which are not. What will you lose to make sure you’re who are - or who you want to be? What will you sacrifice everything to keep?
This is what Farewell, Good Night asks you to grapple with.
Farewell, Good Night is a game written by momatoes, whose website I suggest you click on right there for that first hit of sheer visual delight. Momatoes’ games are as visually stunning as they are thought-provoking, and her latest game is no exception.
The game is inspired by her own experiences with Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), a form of therapy that has been known to cause both temporary and permanent memory loss. On the itch.io page where you can download the game for free, she has this to say about the game:
This game draws upon my personal experience with ECT. I do not regret undergoing it, but it came with costs I still grapple with today. This game is an exploration of this theme. In a way, I made this game for myself, but I still dearly hope that you create your own meaningful experiences with this game.
- momatoes
That being said, Farewell, Good Night is a short game, with minimal rules, and minimal descriptions. It is not an educational game - if you do not have a lot of familiarity with ECT, this game does not do much to change that. There is space in the game to aid with empathy for those who have undergone the treatment, yes - you are asked to imagine the ward. A description of the situation is given, and part of the game’s loop is set - in the vaguest of terms - during the treatment itself, as the electricity is applied.
The main focus of the game, however, involves bargaining for your memories with God.
I played this as a solo-journalling experience, playing as both God and the patient - though I’m also eager to get to play the two-player version. God in this game is tasked with pushing the patient into potentially uncomfortable places - and I imagine that makes for a very different play experience.
The way the game works is this: in the day phase, you receive a gift from your brother, something that sparks a memory. You use a deck of standard playing cards to determine what the gift is, and what kind of memory it evokes. God then pokes and prods at the memory - asking the patient leading questions about it, adding depth to the memory, heightening its significance. God then tells the patient that an aspect of that memory was misremembered - and it’s left to the patient to then remember what really happened.
In the night phase, treatment begins. God gives the player a bargain - the patient has a chance to keep their memory, but they will lose another vital part of themselves in the process. It’s worth emphasizing - accepting this bargain means the patient only has a chance to keep their memory. There is every possibility that they lose it even after paying God’s cost.
Electricity is then applied, in what might be the most distressing part of the game. You roll a d20. Again, and again, until you roll between a 7 and a 12. Each time you roll outside the range, you are aware that the treatment is still underway, but it has not yet taken hold the way it’s meant to. It’s one of those rules that changes nothing mechanically, in the gameplay, but creates a rather stressful experience on its own.
When the treatment does take hold…that’s when God takes over. Describing, in detail, what is lost. What parts of the memories fade away, forever, or how the patient changes, having given up a part of themselves to hold onto that memory. Three times until the treatment ends, and the patient has lost something, irrevocably.
I’ve led a fairly boring life. The memories I drew upon described very mundane things. As I played, I thought less about what kinds of memory-stories would have been vital to my character, Cee, and just went more with vibes - seeing what sparked when I drew cards and looked up the table of prompts to see what momentoes the cards represented.
(I also used Tarot cards instead of regular playing cards, because if you ignore the Major Arcana and the Pages, a Tarot deck works just as well - and provides more inspiration, besides).
Creating mundane memories presented a bit of a challenge for God - finding out leading questions that might enrich the memory. To make it more powerful - or more painful. A memory of making origami with Cee’s family turned into a tension-filled memory of his parents fighting with each other. A memory of the first time he learned how dull Monopoly was compared to other board games evolved into a memory of the first time he fell in love with someone he still hasn’t confessed his feelings to.
It can be easy to see the God of this game as a cruel one. Whether God’s leading questions are making the memory better or worse, God still has the job of making a memory more valuable - just before telling the patient what they’ll have to sacrifice in order to keep that memory. As God, the game encourages you to make sure that bargain is as difficult as it could be. Perhaps they lose an emotion. A source of joy. A principle. Do you, as the patient hold on to a memory, or the way that memory changed who you are? Are you made up of your memories - or are you what the memories have left behind?
You will always lose something, in this game. There is every chance you lose more than you bargained for - but you will, in this game, take the time to describe what is being lost. To dive deep into a memory you might be saying goodbye to forever. To have God narrate how letting go of a part of yourself changes you forever. The game even asks you to write what you lost somewhere on your body.
This is not a game about fighting to keep these building blocks of yourself - it is a game about mourning them as they slip through your fingers. About grieving them - about saying goodbye.
As a reviewer, the mark of a good TTRPG isn’t the stories it inspires, but what kind of storytelling it encourages, facilitates, or necessitates. Necessitates is especially important here - as written, not only does this game make sure the patient loses something of themselves, it takes pains to make sure that whatever is lost is significant.
As I’ve said before, I do not come away from this game with a much deeper understanding of what those who go through ECT experience. What’s easier to understand, and what is more universal, is the thought of losing a part of yourself forever. The very act of growing older means that it happens, one way or another, to all of us. As you grow older, you change, you forget. Some parts of yourself you must fight to keep - take the time to remember them, take the time to strengthen them. If ECT takes your memories, then this game about ECT asks you to remember just how important they are. To not take these ephemeral parts of yourself for granted. To grieve what you’ve lost - and to grieve what you might not remember you’ve lost.
You could - if you wished - easily hack parts of this game and stitch it into another. The mechanics of bargaining for a memory can facilitate powerful storytelling no matter what game you’re playing. As written, however, Farewell, Good Night is a work of art that represents a difficult, but powerful facet of Momatoes’ personal experience, and invites you to explore that facet in your own way. It is the best of what art can do - it is a game worth experiencing for yourself.
Farewell, Good Night is available to download here.
Great review Armaan! Very detailed and thoughtful, thanks for writing it!