Article written by Ethan Lawrence. Kindly offered to Finger Guns for publication.
[This article will contain major spoilers for the mid to late game of 2023’s Sea of Stars]
On the 6th of April 2026, my aunt passed away after a brutal but mercifully short bout with cancer.
That’s how this article is opening.
The thing with cancer, that dragon cancer, is that everyone either has lost someone or knows someone who has lost someone through it. It’s a universal truth. As our life expectancy as a species increases, so too does the chance of cancer. Biologically, we’re all ticking clocks. Our very cellular structure has planned obsolescence built into it. But of course the cruel irony of cancer is that sometimes it doesn’t wait for age and biology. It can strike anywhere at any time.
My aunt didn’t make it to 100. She didn’t even make it to 70. My grandfather outlived her. All of her siblings too. Not even a year earlier, she was well. Now she’s gone.
It was the first time in my life I had experienced the loss of a close family member. As it happened, I found out mere hours before I was due to go onstage for Horrible Histories The Concert at the Barbican in York. Twice. Then two times again the next day. Then a further five performances in Brighton to boot. I was completely isolated from my family not only geographically but mentally and contractually. That’s a little unfair actually. I could have taken time out. I probably should have done. But when we found out she was not only ill but terminally so, she informed me in no uncertain terms that if I let it affect the tour she would kick my arse. This later turned into kicking my arse from beyond the grave. I was already struggling; I didn’t need to be haunted as well.
I was fortunate that I had something to focus on and a good team around me. I will be forever grateful to my fellow cast and crew members of the tour who steered me through with advice, support and the simple act of being there. That’s the thing with cancer, that dragon cancer. Everyone has been affected by it in some way. But in practical terms, I never had a proper opportunity to grieve. My public needed me. Only I had the strength and fortitude to prat about onstage as Henry VIII for two hours. When the time came for the show to be over, closing a fortnight later in Sunderland, I hadn’t shed a single tear. That’s not me pretending to be all hard by the way; I am a crier as anyone who read my other article for this website about Clair Obscur would know. But circumstances had contrived to make it so that I was never stood in one place long enough to process what had happened. A week after the show closed we saw her off with a celebration of life ceremony and the tears still didn’t come. I wondered if there was something wrong with me but I remembered something my cast mate Richard David-Caine (shout out to Richard) said on the Thursday after that phone call: “It’s only been four days, you’re allowed to be fucked up”.
As April turned to May I settled down to play some video games. The nature of touring meant I hadn’t had much opportunity to do so this year and, inevitably, a backlog had built up. Paralysed by choice, I decided to ignore all the shiny new titles and instead go back to a game I had already completed in 2024. Sea of Stars.
Sea of Stars is a 16 bit RPG style throwback developed by Sabotage. As you were warned at the top of this article, I am going to spoil this game’s back half so I assume if you got this far you are familiar with it but if not, picture a turn based dungeon exploration game with considerably more modcons than the games it took inspiration from, a gorgeous art style and soundtrack and a wonderfully written story.
Valere and Zale are Solstice Warriors tasked with defeating Dwellers, creatures of great evil power created by an entity known as The Fleshmancer who, unchecked, can be come World Eaters. In this, they are assisted by a small party of companions as you would expect for a turn based party battler. One thing that always struck me about Sea of Stars is how warm hearted it is. I can’t even count the number of party based RPGs that contain one (usually more) brash or argumentative character. I understand why of course. Inter-party drama is fun and is usually a good way to undercut the moral imperative some heroes in these games display but it’s entirely absent here. There is no catty dialogue at all. Everyone is deeply respectful and kind to their friends and the people they meet on the journey and this is never more on display in the character of Garl.
Ah Garl. In a morally uncomplicated group he is the sentimental core. Having no powers of his own, he is a playmate of the child Solstice Warriors and is separated from them for a period of many years as they undergo their training. He still make his presence felt though, using the light from a magnifying glass to power an elevator just to deliver a jar of cookies to the trainees. As they embark on their adventure properly, Garl joins them, now a young adult with a sense of adventure in his heart, styling himself as a warrior cook.
Garl goes through many hardships during the journey. Hell, in the prologue as children he loses an eye during a disastrous attempt to explore a cave. He is later possessed by a Dweller and while saved by an intervention from the mysterious assassin Seraï , still necessitates an entire questline to bring him out of a deliberately induced coma. Despite all of this, he never loses his spirit. Unlike other peppy or kooky characters from other games though, it’s not overbearing. The sweet nature of the writing gives a tone of sincerity that counters that annoyance you can sometimes feel towards someone who is positive all the time even in the worst possible moments. That, tied with his ability to heal during battle and cook useful items outside of it makes him mechanically significant alongside his welcome place in the narrative.
And then, about halfway through the game, Garl dies.
Killed, in fact, by the Fleshmancer. Utterly senselessly too. Collateral damage in the eternal war games of entities more powerful than anyone in the story could possibly fathom. On death’s door, he requests the use of a Flask of Borrowed Time, which places him in a state of half life but allows him to carry out a grand plan. With utterly singular focus, he performs a series of actions (one of which being cooking an enormous loaf of bread using the heat of a volcano to wake a sleeping dragon (did I mention I love this game?)) that set up the back half the game, allowing the remaining party members to traverse the Sea of Stars and experience a pretty remarkable twist in the narrative that I won’t spoil here just in case this does inspire you to play the game.
But then his time runs out and he just dies. That’s it. They bury him under his favourite tree, the cooking plot lid he uses as a shield placed against it and, remarkably, with the fate of the world at stake, they stop. Two weeks in game pass as the characters allow themselves to stop, breathe and grieve. The apocalypse can wait as they take time to remember their friend.
My aunt was a warrior cook of sorts. Her, my uncles and of course my dear old mum are all remarkable chefs. She was something else though. Her Facebook is littered with pictures of these extraordinary themed cakes she would make for her friends. She once gave us the recipe for her paella but we remain convinced she left something out because it was never as good as how she made it. She was also plagued with illnesses throughout her life, even before cancer wrapped around her liver. But she never lost her spark nor let anything stop her. She was the most stubborn person I have ever known. This is a woman who, at the onset of the pandemic said, quite clearly “I’m not getting Covid”. She didn’t either. She was also a caregiver. She kept house for my grandfather and her son while also dedicating the majority of her working life to foster parenting with a focus on newborn babies who would live with her for one or two years before going onto their forever homes. The ripples she left in the pool of our collective lives spread so far. The sheer amount of people at her celebration of life was staggering, not least since one of the attendees was one of the first children she fostered, now a grown man with children of his own. And her final act towards me was to remind me to focus, to concentrate on the dream of performing on huge stages across the UK which I had had since I was a boy. Much like Garl, she made sure she was useful to the very end.
She never got to see the show live, but I was able to get a recorded dress rehearsal to her as her care changed from preventative to palliative. She enjoyed it and I’m just glad she got to see me finally making real what I had promised for so long.
I had played Sea of Stars before so I obviously knew this was all going to happen. It’s true what they say though: you take out of art what you bring to it. Even two years ago, I lacked the experience of grief to truly know just how well Sea of Stars handled it. It doesn’t shy away from the actual reality of losing someone. The feel the hole Garl leaves both mechanically as a party member but also through the carefully chosen words of dialogue and character interactions that continue to play out hours after the event actually happens. I was particularly struck by a conversation between Valere and Seraï later on. Valere says “I used to think grief was a negative emotion that eventually went away, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s just… always there” before talking about how she’s focusing on how lucky she was to have known someone so special. “Just like Garl to be the highlight of the day without even being here” It’s only been four days…weeks…months…years… you’re allowed to be fucked up.
I was shellshocked at my response and had to put the game down for a bit. For the first time since she passed, I cried. Inspired to tears by a game that perfectly captured the sense of negative space death leaves in its wake for those left behind. When I wrote my last article for this website, I stopped playing Clair Obscur altogether to make sure my words would be fresh and untainted by further study. But I couldn’t do that this time because I had played the game before and I knew Sea of Stars does something… weird.
After rolling credits on the game for the first time you are transported back to just before the final boss and witness a stone circle in an early game area starting to glow with a mysterious light and the individual monoliths themselves, when interacted with, provide a clue to some kind of endgame task you must complete. This is serious stuff too. The requirements are beating a sequence of superbosses in order to obtain ultimate equipment for your party as well as finding all sixty rainbow conch items scattered around the world. It’s really asking you for mastery across all the game systems and mechanics to unlock a true ending of sorts. Lighting up all the stones and presenting the cookie jar from the very beginning of the game allows you to alter the flow of time and place a substitute in the way of the attack of the Fleshmancer, saving Garl while maintaining the story and world state progress. Garl re-joins the party, alive once again, and his presence during the final battle alters who you fight, providing a hard as nails boss that in turn gives you a lovely gold star next to your saved game.
Hmm.
When I played this game initially I didn’t think much of it. It’s a game that was already mucking around with concepts of time and multiple worlds and was still video gamey enough to provide space for it. But approaching it a second time after losing someone so recently, it struck as not only wrong but completely at odds with which direction the game seemed to be pulling. Undercutting the weight of losing someone through, of all things, mastering systems of gameplay sucked all the gravity out of a really powerful moment. Why go to such lengths to craft lines of such exquisite, simple beauty as related above only to render the entire exercise worthless?
To be clear, I do not believe for a second this was the game’s intention. The very fact this ending is gated behind essentially the entirety of the endgame content (sans DLC) means it was only ever intended as a reward for people who were solidly invested in seeing the entire thing through to the bitter end. Indeed, it doesn’t really change THAT much narratively, with the post final boss cutscenes playing out virtually the same way. However, by abnegating its narrative responsibility to make Garl’s death mean something through its permanence, Sea of Stars accidentally taught me another lesson about grief.
In reality, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, how much you try, you cannot bring someone back. I followed her wishes and completed the tour. 62 shows across 17 venues to in excess of 100000 people in total. It was the greatest achievement of my professional career so far, the culmination of a lifelong dream. But she’s still dead. She always will be. One day I will be too. And the best way to honour her memory is to continue to conduct myself in a way that would make her proud.
Sea of Stars finally taught me how to hold my grief. As Valere said, it’s not a negative emotion that fades, but instead an ongoing state of being that can sometimes provoke happiness as much as it does sadness. I thank Sabotage for doing that. I also forgive them for undermining that lesson with a well-intentioned but tonally inconsistent addendum to Garl’s story. Perhaps next time I play it, I’ll remember to be okay with accepting a better story with an inconclusive ending, rather than striving to find perfection in the already broken. Much like losing someone itself.
Dedicated to Kim Slater. PLEASE don’t haunt me.
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Our thanks to Ethan for sharing this article. You can Ethan on socials under the handle @EthanDLawrence and is a semi-regular guest on The Finger Guns Podcast.