(tw: discussions of gruesome deaths and suicide). After hearing about it from another classmate on Wednesday, I experimented with the ghosttown mod which turned all the NPCs into ghosts, and creatively integrated the remains of the original characters into the setting of the town. Other than the aesthetic (perhaps identification) alterations of the mod, the rest of the gameplay remained unchanged; the characters did not directly acknowledge the morbid state of their town, and the dialogue and quests remained true to “the canon.” The background setting of gruesome, violent deaths (and some apparent suicides) went unsaid, but still subtly recontextualized the narrative arcs of Stardew.
On one hand the mod offered a morbid form of character exploration and development. The mod owner creatively designed the cause of death to take inspiration from the development of the characters in the canonical game. For example, in the canon, Abigail often mentions how she wishes to explore the mines. In the mod, her mutilated remains are found in the mines, with only her purple hair left visible (also aesthetically matching the purple amethyst in the mines). Perhaps a moralistic warning tale can be interpreted from the gap between these two plot events: perhaps one can infer that Abigail had wandered the mines with rose colored spectacles, and suffered the reality of the violent, unforgiving monsters that dwell there too. This narrative interpretation echoes the fairytale trope in which an innocent girl enters a dark, unknown, forest (or, in this case, mines), and is violently attacked, such as in Little Red Riding Hood or (to a certain extent) in Hansel and Gretel.
This kind of implied storyline interpretation, in which the original context of the character is provided from the character’s canonical development, and the circumstances of the character’s death is derived from the aesthetics of the mod, is unique to the video game format of Stardew Valley. It is almost as if the mod creator wrote fanfiction, but the fanfiction only described scenes of character deaths without expalanation. The work of constructing a plot to explain the morbid world of the mod is left to the player. The most comparable piece of media I could think of was Alice Oswald’s poetic novel Memorial which (also, as a form of metafiction) revisits the canonical deaths of the Iliad, and lingers on each one, memorializing each victim of the war. However, in that example, the Iliad provides the narrative context of the deaths; here, neither the canonical game nor the mod fill that gap. As an example of this kind of work, the youtuber Turin created a run through of the game, which he framed as a murder mystery, as he speculated who the murderer was, and if some of the seemingly suicides were perhaps disguised murders as well (Turin).
The deaths are all suited individually to each character’s canonical psychology, as understood through their dialogue, and quests. Canon!Wizard has a quest which involves traveling on the train to retrieve Magic Ink from his Ex-wife, and the corpse of mod!Wizard is found on the railroad tracks. Canon!Lewis spends hours tending his garden; the decapitated head of the Lewis of the mod is found planted in his garden. Canon!Alex has a dog named Dusty; in the mod, Alex’s corpse is found in his dog’s food bowl, as if his dog was fed his dead body. Willie loves fishing in the original; in the revision, he is reimagined as having drowned in the Ocean. Some of these deaths, such as Willy’s and Lewis’s, are shaped by their occupation and their hobbies; there seems to be some sort of “creepy poetic justice” (Turin) in the way that their professions and passions feature in their deaths.
Finally, the unchanged dialogue develops a new tone in the ghost town that the characters live in. In the original when Mayor Lewis notices that “Everyone seems a little happier on the weekends, don’t they?” it appears as an innocent remark. In the mod, when his ghost form says that in the context of everyone in the town having been violently killed and turned into ghosts, the remark becomes more sinister. His comment on happiness becomes a bit more tragic; if they are dead, presumably their default emotional state is sad; then the happiness on weekends seems more stark, scarce, and notable miniscule than it is in the original. There’s a note of tragic desperation in his observation. Similarly, when Lewis says “a true angler has respect for the water and don’t you forget that,” it sounds like he is issuing a foreboding warning. Lewis’ comment formally transitions from small talk to a deeper, more intimate and important kind of warning.
Works Cited
Oswald, Alice. Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad. Faber and Faber, 2011.
Turin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsXMS4-5if4&ab_channel=Turin)
