I first played through Rocket of Whispers in 2018 – back then I thought it was a beautiful story and concept wrapped with some clunky mechanics. I liked it a lot, but being a short 4-5 hour experience I expected to forget about it soon enough.
It turns out the story stayed with me much longer and more strongly than I expected – My grandmother passed away about 18 months after I played, and this is the first piece of media that came to mind as I looked to put my feelings in order.
‘Rocket of Whispers’ is named aptly- it’s a quiet game, based around the premise of two people, possibly the last on their world, attempting to perform a final ritualistic ‘space burial’. This involves launching a rocket to reach the fringe of space, a ceremony designed to bring peace to those who have died.
The story both past and present unfolds as one of the player-protagonists, John, scavenges the landscape around the rocket factory for the materials needed to complete the mission. It can be a frustrating process, John is impeded by the environment, sometimes unclear direction, and the often-irritated voices of the ‘spirits’ of the departed who demand that he do better. In my first playthrough I labelled the difficulty in navigating as a game-design flaw, but the next time around I saw that the experience mirrors John’s own perception of the tasks: pointless, dangerous fetch-quests in pursuit of hollow ritual.
The other survivor, Fei, remains steadfast in her dedication even as she doubts her ability to engineer a rocket capable of fulfilling the task before her, and quietly resents her deceased friends and mentors for placing such a responsibility on her alone. Her relationship with John and the conversations/arguments that the two share about the process of launching the space burial form the core of what ‘Rocket of Whispers’ has to say about death, grief, tradition and finding peace after tragedy.
SIGONO has gone on to make a number of wonderful, narrative focused games after this one- both Echoes of Starsong and Prism Peak are small masterpieces in their own right, and both of them are more technically advanced and fleshed out both as stories and as games, but I still think Rocket of Whispers might be my favourite. There’s something about the simplicity here, the unvoiced dialogue, the vectored, but expressive character designs that allows your mind to fill in personally resonant blanks. The single repeated line, “May the living find comfort, and the dead return in peace.” Has stayed with me for years now, bubbling to the surface of my mind at funerals, the deaths of pets and reminiscent conversations about the past.
Finally, I love the conclusion of the story and wouldn’t change a thing about it, but sometimes I’m still haunted by the question of just what happened to John and Fei after the credits roll. Who will launch a space burial for them?
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