This article concerns a game about suicide.
Lie in my Heart isn’t really a game. OK, it is technically, but it’s also the story of an awful time in one man’s life. That man being the developer of the game, Sébastien Genvo.
A game developer as well as a professor at the University of Lorraine in France, Genvo made Lie in my Heart after his wife killed herself. Understandably, it was and remains devastating to him and the son he had with her. Yet through that pain and anguish, he chose to make a game to express his experiences and to highlight the confusion and agony that comes from a sudden death.
It’s a tough game to play. I found tears came to my eyes very readily. Not least because after making a series of difficult decisions, from figuring out how to approach telling your son what happened to looking back at past memories, you’re confronted with a note from the developer telling you how many of the choices you made strayed from his original decisions.
Essentially, that’s a reminder that this really happened. At some point in the developer’s life, they actually had to face these decisions for real. It’s quite the gut punch.
After playing Lie in my Heart, I had to find out how on earth Genvo had the strength to make such a game.
“After this kind of tragedy, you always wonder why all this happened, what could have been done, was it really possible to avoid all this?” Genvo explains to me after I get in contact. “In my case, I also really needed to think about it to find the right answers to the questions of my five-year-old son.”