Closer the Distance Review

This game is a very emotional but wonderful journey about a community that loses one of its members and which impact that has on everyone and how they deal with the grieve. Completion takes around 13 hours.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 13 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1,5
Is there a good guide available: No, but you don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Kinda, however, you can turn back time to earlier days (not forward, only to earlier days, so don’t go too far back) to get missing achievements. I would recommend doing this after you finish the first playthrough.
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: A tiny bit, I struggled with the achievement “The Little Things” but I just needed a bit of luck to get the objective done.
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Ohh “Closer the Distance” you broke me into so many pieces but also got me invested in the story so much and let me fall in love with all the details the developers added.. and that all at once. This was a journey, a wonderful journey but a very sad one and I cried so many times while playing this gem of a game.

I have played the first Orwell game from Osmotic Studios and that one told me already that this studio is so good in telling stories. That one tells a story about the dangers of our online activities. Not everybody’s cup of tea… However, the story in Closer the Distance is one about losing a relative unexpectedly and what that does with a family, but also within a (small) community. Normally it takes me at least some time to get closer to a character to get so emotional. However, Osmotic Studios did such a great job in storytelling that when the main character dies very early on in the game, I instantly became emotional.

In this game, you play as Angie, the person who has died. You are kinda the ghost of Angie that tries so hard to help her loved ones move on. Tries to fix what is broken within the small community of Yesterby, what she already tried to do so much when she was alive, but she can’t let go after she died. This is done in a sims-like gameplay. You start with only having some control over her younger sister because she is the only one who can hear Angie’s voice. You can already see some of the wishes of the other people in the small community of Yesterby and you will unravel more of their wishes and mood swings in the days/weeks/months after Angie passed away. A little into the game you’ll also get a bit of control over some of the other characters. This way you try to complete their wishes for what to do next and what is going on.

I love how they choose to go with a Sims-like game style. Lately so many announced sims-likes got canceled while I desperately looking for something that plays just like The Sims, but on Steam with Steam achievements (and not 50 DLCs). This was such an awesome game, and a great way how they told such a heavy and emotional story. With so many different characters and their own life goals, dreams, and quirks. And did I already mention how much love and attention there went into all the little details?? This goes from portraits of the families hanging in their houses to the sounds of characters sounding more echoey in some locations where that makes more sense, to the beautiful music this game adds. Especially by a character who will join a little later.

This is very out of character for me, but I won’t go too much into detail about the achievements in this game, as most of them are beautiful stories that will play out in the game and I don’t want to ruin their stories by already telling you about them. I would recommend playing through the game blind the first time and just exploring those stories you’re most interested in. You can always go back to earlier days (but this will delete the progress you made after that day). So I highly recommend just playing through the game once and then going back in time to mop up the missing achievements. I had to replay a specific day a few times because I kept having a little bad luck with one of the wishes, however even the third time I played through a day, I still saw new dialog options which was so surprising to me. A lot of the story you already know by then and can easily speed up time to get past them, but to get surprised with even new scenes was amazing.

I give Closer the Distance 4,5 out of 5 stars.

This review for Closer the Distance was written on 4 August 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 25 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.