As Long as You’re Here is heartbreakingly beautiful

One of the odd side effects of moving across the country and changing jobs (with different insurance providers) relatively often, is having a pretty good script to rattle off to my new primary care doctor about all the ailments of my family. As I get older those medical concerns grow in their prominence, consuming more and more of my brain’s background RAM. In 2018, my grandmother passed away at the age of 95. Although, it may be more accurate to say that the woman I knew as my grandmother died in 2016 when her memory fully went.

The few times I was able to fly back to Wisconsin and see her in hospice care are striking memories: rarely could she remember my name or that a person with my name existed in her family. But I also remember sitting in her room as my dad and his sister became increasingly frustrated by my grandmother’s memory lapses. It can be hard to watch someone deteriorate before you, when an hour earlier they seemed like the person you remember. The questions pile up as the memories fade: did you take your meds today, did you water the plants, do you know where you are, what is my name? The list goes on and never really stops. Since 2016, every primary care doctor I’ve had has known I have Alzheimer’s in my family, and since 2018 I’ve raised concerns about early-onset dementia I’ve noticed in my father as well.

As Long as You’re Here is the scariest game I’ve played all year.

I’m not a faith person and I wouldn’t let you hold me to this, but on any given day I think I’d tell you that the “self” is housed somewhere between lived experience and past memory. Frail as memories are, the past—and our perception of it—shape who we are and guide us towards who we want to be. So the background hum of dementia, the genetic threat of Alzheimer’s, my hyper-acuity to my own memory failures, and the slow motion car crash of my dad’s memory has become an existential threat to my metaphysical self.

And it’s why, three hundred words later, I want you to understand how important As Long as You’re Here, a short game from Autoscopia Interactive, is to me.

As Long as You’re Here is the scariest game I’ve played all year. It’s a first person game that takes place almost exclusively in a small apartment. You play as an older woman suffering from Alzheimer’s over the course of a few months. You’re tasked with doing a few things: maintaining your daily routine, having conversations with your family members, and finishing a very simple family tree.

I truly mean it when I say this game is terrifying. As Long as You’re Here is one of the first games that I’ve seen really nail the PT formula in such an effective way. The game is confined to a five-room apartment with each day beginning the same way: make coffee, take your medicine, water the plants. You will quickly fall into a routine, deciding what order you’d like to complete them in, but you’ll also start to feel the creeping horror of memory loss. Your pill container will have a missed day, items will move around the apartment, or rooms that had previously not existed appear.

The game begins with you sitting on a bus stop bench in the rain with a single prompt to pick up your phone and “call her?” Your daughter answers the phone, mentioning that it’s quite late, then you’re given your first dialogue choice: “Don’t scare her” or “be honest.” Every dialogue choice in this game is simple, but gutting, the internal back and forth of a woman who knows she is slowly losing her self and must decide if she tells the deep and honest truth, or do the best to shield her family from just how bad it is. Later in the game, you’ll be telling a story to your grandson, you’ll feel the memory so deeply rain falls in your living room…and then poof. It’s gone. You didn’t just lose your place, you fully forgot what you were doing.

When I first started the game and made it to the apartment the first time, I began my first day by making coffee. While the coffee brewed, I filled my watering can, then watered the four plants. The coffee dinged, I walked back to the kitchen and my mug that was next to the coffee maker was now gone. I mention this as a warning to you who, like me, make think this is a bug. It is not. I closed the game and restarted from my checkpoint, only to discover that this is the game working as intended. The mug didn’t disappear…you simply moved it and forgot.

As Long as You’re Here plays little magic tricks like this through its entire 2 hour runtime, sneakily hiding your coffee mug or watering can, rapidly changing time of day as you move from one room to another, or swapping your office for a dining room when its out of sight. For as quaint and small as the apartment appears, I never felt at home, eerily aware that something could change, that I cannot trust what I believe to be true. There is no crying baby or scary lady standing at the bannister like in PT, instead there is the fallibility of memory and the collision of past and present. You’ll be transported to your childhood home, that bus stop, or your children’s shared bedroom from their youth. And it all happens within that five-room apartment.

I don’t want to spoil many more moments in As Long as You’re Here, I think this game is the epitome of what games can be: a way to experience a life you never could. Sometimes, that’s living the life of a detective or a pirate, and sometimes that experiencing the final years of my grandmother’s life. You will feel the pain of your memories unraveling and you’ll see your children contemplating your care in front of you, the stress weighing them down. You’ll blank out, losing entire conversations, and you’ll do it in front of your beloved family members fighting back the shame, knowing that it wasn’t because you weren’t paying attention, those memories of a conversation five minutes ago simply don’t exist.

As Long as You’re Here is a heartbreaking, but a powerful reminder of how much we rely on our memories and how lost you can feel when they fade away—and when we know it’s happening and can do nothing about it. At just under two hours from start to finish, I fully recommend this game—if it was any longer, I might’ve run out of tears to cry—even if you don’t have as personal a connection to dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. I know As Long as You’re Here isn’t the typical game you see—there’s no combat, exploration, or experience points—but the story in this tiny game was tenfold more impactful than the biggest narrative games I’ve played this year. Yes, that includes Expedition 33. As Long as You’re Here is a perfect game. Go play it.