I played a lot of Steam Next Fest demos over the weekend, and while I wasn’t able to work through my overly ambitious list of nearly 30 games I wanted to try, that was partly because those I played grabbed my attention and refused to let go. r the Distance, the newest game from Osmotic Studios (who also made Orwell), was one of those games.
I wasn’t the only one immediately taken by this – my colleague Ben Sledge also included it in his list of Steam Next Fest demos to play .
I wasn’t expecting r the Distance to entrance me so immediately and so thoroughly, which is why I surprised even myself when I restarted the demo halfway through instead of wrapping it up. But let me start from the beginning: r the Distance bills itself as “a slice-of-life sim that tells a deeply emotional story about the connections between family and friends in the face of tragedy”. That tragedy happens in the first few minutes of the game and is the inciting incident for the rest of what happens, so I will be spoiling it.
The game opens with a long scene, where teenager Conny finds out that her sister, Angela, has died in a tragic accident. Controlling her character, you go up to Angela’s room, talking to her as if she’s around, and it turns out she is. She is talking to you from beyond the grave. As the game opens up, you can interact with everybody that lives in your small town, each of whom have their own desires, needs, and hopes.
This is where the Sims-inspired gameplay comes in. r the Distance presents its world in gorgeous low-poly graphics that render an entire town in real-time. You can see every room in every house, and what every person is doing. To start with, you can get Conny to go around offering support to every person she knows, because Angela says that they need help. Clicking on that goal in the sidebar will zoom the world out into a map, highlighting every person that you haven’t spoken to yet.
Selecting one of those people might give you a number of options, allowing you to perform the action you need to or perhaps to ask them about something else. Conny will trek over, and a short scene of their conversation will play out. You can stay and watch, speed it up, or click away to see what the other characters are doing. All of these scenes are well-written, and even better, fully voiced with impressive performances, each feeling strikingly unique and fully-realised. Obviously, I recommend watching every scene that is highlighted to you.
You’ll also get to see NPCs having conversations with each other, making their inner lives seem even richer.
This initial objective familiarises you with the different townspeople and who they were to Angela. All of them mourn her in a different way, and the way they mourn then affects the people around them. The game is shockingly complex, weaving deep and complicated relationships between every character, sketching out long-standing histories and grievances between everyone in this small town.
As time goes on, you start being able to control more characters than just Conny. In the demo, I first gained control of Galya, which in turn revealed just how differently each character is designed. Every character has different needs – they all need to eat and sleep, yes, but Conny also requires routine and solitude, which she fulfils by sewing and writing in her diary.
The doctor Galya, in turn, has a strong desire to stay healthy (which is why she needs a morning run and healthy food to eat), and values diligence, loyalty, and resilience in herself. This means that she doesn’t turn inwards when she grieves, but instead insists on helping the grieving family with chores. She does their laundry, makes the funeral wreath, and ensures nobody is going it alone.
Galya being playable complicates the game, which up till that point had been fairly simple. Now, as you control two different characters and ensure their needs, you also have to balance multiple tasks and jump around the map to make sure what needs to be done gets done.
This is also where choices come in – what will Galya prioritise? Will she sacrifice her own needs to help the people around her? Will she take the easy, less time-consuming way out of things or go out of her way to do everything as best as she can? This is where I restarted my game: I made a choice I didn’t mean to and immediately regretted it, so I started a new save file. Every choice you make feels important, because the characters feel so human.
You can also unlock one last character, Angela’s friend Zek, who has his own important choices to make in his arc. I’m unsure how many characters you will end up controlling throughout the full game and how much these choices will impact what happens throughout the story, but I find the idea of being able to guide all these townspeople towards a better life incredibly compelling. Out of all the demos I tried during Steam Next Fest, this is the one I’ve been thinking about the longest, and it’s the one I spent the most time in. Please don’t sleep on r the Distance.
