Laughing to Die

Laughing to Die opens at the kind of family gathering that should be a celebration. The protagonist, Nannan, has returned to her hometown for her grandmother's funeral — but the grandmother lived to a hundred, and in the local tradition that makes this a "happy funeral," a banquet rather than a wake. The relatives are eating and toasting; Nannan is the one who can't quite settle into the mood.

When she catches sight of a figure that looks exactly like her grandmother somewhere in the house, she follows it — and ends up in a room that doesn't belong in the building she just walked through. Each room she finds afterward holds a fragment of the grandmother's story, told from angles no one at the banquet downstairs has ever heard, and the further Nannan goes the less the celebration outside makes sense.

The horror here is cultural and quiet rather than reactive — about what a community decides to celebrate, what gets erased to make that celebration possible, and what happens to anyone who keeps asking. The game is a Chinese-language release, with text available in Chinese only.