14 DAY TRIAL // Rarely have I found a video game that can create an emotion deep inside my petrified heart, but Mass Effect 3 has managed to draw a sigh and a few minutes of contemplation on the theme of loss and regret with nothing more than a few lines of dialog, two character models and a number of suggestions.
On the Citadel, near the human embassy offices, an Asari and an old woman talk, delivering new lines each time the player travels back to the Citadel.
They are easy to miss and have almost no connection to the rest of the game, but they are crucial to my Mass Effect 3 experience and great examples of what video games can offer when it comes to regret.
The woman seeks information about her son, who was deployed with the military and was caught in the initial Reaper assault.
It’s clear that there’s a big chance that he is dead or at least incapable of communicating with the Navy and the embassy, but that’s not what creates emotion and a feeling of loss.
It gradually emerges that the soldier was engaged with the Asari and the mother seems to slowly slip into a sort of amnesiac state as she is affected by the pain of losing her son just as the former fiancée grows weary of reminding her of the past.
The exchanges are awkward and I had the urge to move away from the desk and simply get on with my quests, without paying attention to the actual narrative thread of the two women.
But I always stopped there trying to hear something more, to understand their pain, knowing that I have no way of easing it and that my only rational answer was to hit the Reapers hard and make them pay for the suffering they have caused to these two characters.