How to Say Goodbye

How to Say Goodbye is a narrative puzzle game developed by two indie developers, Florian Veltman and Baptiste Portefaix. The story follows the fate of ghosts, trying to discover who they were when they were alive and why they still haven't crossed over to the "other side." The tale presented here tells the story of loss, how to cope with and accept it in a way that is friendly to a younger audience.

How to Say Goodbye is a game divided into levels and filled with various puzzles. The locations we explore are spaces that are the boundary between life and death, where our heroes have stopped. The goal of the game is to lead a group of ghosts to the exit, symbolized by a door. To get there, we have to move our character along a moving grid so that it gets to the right place. An additional complication are lost ghosts (called "spleens" in the game), which try to thwart us by blocking the way to the door.

The game features a 2D graphics design with gameplay elements shown in isometric view. The cartoonish style of How to Say Goodbye is inspired by illustrations from children's books by authors such as Tomi Ungerer, Tove Jansson, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Maurice Sendak.