A Sacred Goodbye in the Middle of a Video Game: When play made space for grief

Nathan Webb

I want to tell you a story about something that happened during our Pixel Pilgrimage play-through of Neva.

It’s not my story to tell entirely, so I’m going to be careful with it. But it happened in the room — in our digital gathering, with the controller in my hand and the game unfolding on screen — and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

We were about halfway through Neva, a game that’s already heavy with meaning. It’s a story about a woman and a wolf cub she raises. And like all good stories about raising something or someone, it eventually becomes a story about letting go.

You can see it coming from the beginning. The cub gets bigger. The woman gets quieter. The world asks more of both of them. By the time you reach the middle of the game, you’re already carrying a lot — grief, awe, the quiet ache of watching someone grow beyond you.

At one of our regular reflection points (we pause every 30 minutes and ask four questions) someone spoke up in the chat. They didn’t say much, just a few sentences. But it was clear that something had landed hard. They shared that they had recently lost a parent. It had been a long illness, a long goodbye. Years of caretaking, years of slow decline. The kind of loss that stretches out over time. And somehow, Neva had become a mirror.

They didn’t say it dramatically. They weren’t trying to hijack the moment. They just… shared. The scene in the game had reminded them of something they hadn’t let themselves feel. It gave them a little room. A small crack in the wall. And they walked through it — with all of us sitting right there, quietly, not needing to fix it.

It was one of the most sacred things I’ve ever seen happen during a video game.

We didn’t plan that moment. There was no clever discussion prompt, no sermon in our back pocket.

We just paused. We asked what people were noticing, avoiding, delighting in, and missing. We made space. The game did what it was already doing. And someone opened the door.

That’s the part I keep returning to: we didn’t manufacture meaning. We just made space for it to emerge.

That’s the secret sauce of Pixel Pilgrimage.

It’s not about finding God in the game. It’s about trusting that God is already present — in our stories, in our memories, in what’s stirring beneath the surface — and that a good story, told well, can call some of that to the surface.

In that moment, Neva wasn’t just a story about a wolf and a woman. It was a story about a son and his mother. About tending to someone in their final days. About the grief that doesn’t end when someone dies. About the strange tenderness of goodbye.

It’s a video game. But it became a holy place.

Why Games Can Do This

There’s something unique about video games as a medium. You’re not just watching a story unfold — you’re participating. You’re pressing the buttons. You’re choosing when to move forward. You’re sitting with the silence.

That makes it personal in a different way. You can’t just coast. Even slow games require your presence. And when that presence is paired with a story that echoes something real in your life, the emotional impact can be profound.

I’ve seen that again and again in Pixel Pilgrimage. Games don’t just make us think. They make us feel. They remind us of things we’ve buried or put on hold. And when we experience that in community — even a quiet, simple digital one — it can become transformative.

I don’t want to paint this like it was some big emotional breakthrough with tears and healing music in the background.

A lot of folks — especially in grief — don’t need a spectacle. They need permission. They need someone to hold space with them for 60 seconds. They need to say, “That scene hit me harder than I expected,” and not be met with nervous silence or a quick pivot.

And I think it’s worth saying: video games are rarely seen as appropriate places for that kind of emotional honesty. They’re usually dismissed as entertainment or escapism. But I’ve watched too many moments like this happen — too many people be surprised by what a game stirred in them — to believe that anymore.

Games are legitimate places for soul work. They’re modern-day storytelling rituals. And sometimes they do what nothing else can.

After the person shared, we sat with it for a minute. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I think I just said “thank you for sharing that.” We let the moment be the moment. And then, gently, we returned to the game.

That’s the other gift of pilgrimage. It keeps moving. Not to rush past the pain, but to carry it with you. To let the journey shape what comes next.

Neva is about love that endures beyond presence. And in its way, it gave all of us a picture of that — and gave one person in particular a little more room to let go.