Words: 1443 Approximate Reading Time: 10-15 minutes
Spoiler Warning: This essay obviously contains spoilers for the narrative of Rime, but even just knowing the basic theme is enough to spoil a significant reveal of the game. Thus, if you are even potentially interested, I suggest immediately closing this page and playing the game for yourself first.
A while back I played a very beautiful and charming puzzle game called Rime. One of the wonderful things about Rime is that it is one of those games where the narrative is communicated without the use of dialogue. Everything is told from the interactions of characters, the setting, and so on.
I enjoyed Rime a great deal because the art was fantastic, the music was pleasant to listen to and fit with all of the settings, the puzzles were fun and challenging enough without being frustrating, the characters were all interesting and animated to convey their emotions well. It was fun from beginning to end.
And upon finishing it, I knew I wanted to eventually do a thematic analysis of it.
And yet when I tried to sit down I found it hard to do a proper analysis. I’ve had an essay half-written for a while, but I hit a stopping point.
At first, I thought the issue was that I needed to replay the game to really explore the details. But that wasn’t really true. The theme was pretty simple. Knowing the details would certainly be relevant to the writing process, but wouldn’t accomplish much.
So I kept leaving this topic to the side. Maybe I’d figure out how to tackle it later.
And that was when it hit me. The problem was that the theme was simple.
Which lead me to the realization what I needed to write about.
Grief
Let’s start with the underlying theme of Rime.
There’s a fair chance you may be aware of the Five Stages of Grief. This is a psychological theory that seeks to explain how people process trauma in their lives, going (at different rates) through a series of stages, which are as follows:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
Now this whole “Five Stages” idea is pretty heavily criticized. There’s not really any solid evidence that people actually experience grief like this. Or more appropriately, that while some people process trauma this way, it’s not necessarily universal.
Of course, for the purpose of art, that doesn’t necessarily matter. It’s incredibly likely that if you’re aware of the Five Stages, you don’t know the criticisms of it. Which is true of a lot of ideas. Like a lot of other people, the Five Stages is just a truism that we all just know.
I bring this up because Rime is about grief, specifically through the lens of the Five Stages. I do not say this as a point of speculation, either. The game wears its theme on its sleeve, though it is something that you realize once you have reached the end. Upon completing the game you have the opportunity to select a chapter to replay, and each chapter is named according to each stage of grief. It is upon seeing that chapter select that you connect how the parts of the game fit within the theme.
For examples, how the first area – Denial – is bright and sunny and idyllic. It feels mysterious but free of danger. A place where nothing is wrong. Meanwhile the next stage – Anger – has you being attacked by a giant bird creature and struggling to dodge its attacks (and in turn, your objective requires destroying the creature).
Stories and Themes
But that leads us to the fundamental question – what is the game about?
The obvious answer is that it’s about the five stages of grief. But that’s not a terribly helpful answer. It’s true, but it doesn’t give us anything else to work with.
Because we use the word “theme” to mean two things at once. On the one hand, we use it to mean this very brief word or phrase that constitutes a concept. The five stages of grief, or immortality, or determination, or loneliness. Usually we draw these concepts from a continually repeated word provided by the game. Basically the game explicitly brings up this concept many times, and we know that it is about that concept.
But on the other hand, we use it to mean what the game has to say about that concept. Indeed, this is what the word “theme” properly means. It’s not enough for the game to be about the five stages of grief. It needs to say something about the five stages of grief. What that “something” is doesn’t really matter. Maybe the game is saying that it doesn’t think the stages are real. Maybe it’s exploring how the stages relate to interpersonal relationships. You just want it to be about more than just the concept.
And that’s why I was struggling so much. Because I could clearly pull out a theme in the first sense. But every time I thought more about it, I couldn’t pull out any theme in the second sense. The game was about the five stages of grief…but that felt like that was it. Each detail deepened the connection, but didn’t provide any meaning outside of the concept. Didn’t tell us what to do with that concept.
Yet I remember feeling like the game was still beautiful to experience, and the reveal of the theme was still interesting by recontextualizing what I had seen before.
And that’s the conclusion I wanted to reach here. That as fun and valuable it can be to explore a theme more deeply and pull a greater message from that concept, it’s not necessary for an enjoyable experience.
Those deep themes we’re talking about, the second type that involves a more thorough journey and complex interpretive analysis, are not necessarily the end goal of storytelling. Sometimes it’s fine for a story to not have a deeper meaning, both from the perspective of the author and the audience.
From the author’s perspective, a good story can still be one that is compelling and well-told. Sometimes those deeper meanings just don’t come through. You have an idea for characters and plot points that seem interesting, but you can’t put those together into some kind of thematic exploration. And that’s fine. Stories with strong theming exist elsewhere.
From the audience’s perspective, a story needs to be something that keeps us engaged. That engagement can be through fun, or humor, or tension, or anything else. Often when we are first hearing or reading a story we experience it on a surface level. It is a collection of scenes and dialogue and plot points and so on. When we are able to sit down with that experience, and perhaps go through it again, the themes begin to feel more present. But that also means that what makes a story engaging doesn’t necessarily have to be its theming. As long as those core components are good, that piece of media can be good.
So when looking at Rime, the thing that makes that very simple theme of the five stages of grief feel engaging is its reveal. The fact that at the end your journey has been recontextualized, and you are invited to rethink what you’ve just done in light of those five stages.
That on its own can be engaging and interesting, even if there is nothing deeper.
Concluding Remarks
As much as I love doing thematic breakdowns, it’s important to acknowledge that kind of analysis doesn’t always work. Specifically, there are two kinds of breakdown. On the one hand is what’s part of a game’s intent. On the other hand is what we might personally take from the experience regardless of that intent.
While the former kind of analysis might be difficult to do with Rime, that doesn’t mean we can’t perform any kind of analysis at all.
Rather, my exploration here is about thematic analysis as an objective of its own. That when we engage with narratives, we can and should be willing to accept that maybe this kind of full analysis doesn’t need to be done. That sometimes we can let a story just be a story – a collection of characters who talk to each other and perform actions within a world.
Though in saying this, we should not say that all stories are just stories. These kinds of analysis are still useful. But we need to be open to either possibility. One possibility is that we are digging for something that isn’t there. The other possibility is that we are refusing to dig for something that is there.
Abstracting Games 