Join a son retracing some confusing footsteps previously taken with his recently-deceased father with In The Morning Turns to Ash.
You’ll go on a ramble through an overgrown countryside, weaving along trodden-in paths, in John Vanderhoef’s 2018 adaption of his 2016 everyday-poetry project In The Morning Turns to Ash.
While most introspective-styled narrative exploration games tend to follow extremes like loss, absence, or love, In The Morning Turns to Ash instead follows somebody attempting to cope in confusion. It’s been years since the protagonist last saw their estranged father. While their father was not necessarily a good or bad person, the player-character spends a lot of their time questioning the reason they so frequently came out on a trip into the wilderness – a journey that they are now repeating.
Coming in at about 20 minutes of playtime, and covering a day in the wastes, there is a lot of voiced story which addresses questions the character has about their father and life, exploring depression, adulthood, and parenthood. It all feels deeply personal, a sign of good writing, and almost feels as if you are intruding on the life of an actual human; I was surprised to find that it wasn’t actually a biography.
While, like many narrative exploration titles of this type, there is no real closure for the player, Vanderhoef manages to densely pack in the protagonist’s realizations, and while they do not find closure about their father, they do learn a lot about life.
For me, the thing which sticks out the most about In The Morning Turns to Ash is how atmospheric it was. There were moments where I expected things to appear, but they never did. It was a solitary experience which managed to perfectly deliver on that feeling of loneliness.
In The Morning Turns to Ash is available for free on Itch.io.
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