The first time I licked my claws by the grave, I found that the hair was translucent. My name is Toby, a cat that was resurrected from the American countryside in 1920. My new home is an animal cemetery on the hill, and my job is to be a gravekeeper here — to take care of animals whose souls have not completely left like me. _Revenant Hill_ gave me not a horror story, but a warm note about loss, memory and small resistance.
The management of the cemetery is very simple: clean up the fallen leaves, repair the fence, and put the right things for each grave. Squirrels like acorns, rabbits miss alfalfa grass, and there should always be a small piece of flint in front of the old badger’s monument. As the seasons changed, visitors appeared one after another: a frog poet wearing a worn-out hat, an possum mother and son who was always lost, and a carrier pigeon colonel who claimed to have seen the World War. They brought stories in exchange for a small piece of safe habitat. There are no gold coins here, only trust is slowly piling up.
The dialogue is in the moonlight. The animal dead are not talking about shock, but regret. The fox who was hit by a car misses his lover at the other end of the mountain. The mouse who escaped from the laboratory will still dream of the cage, and the robin who died in the cold winter asks me what spring is like. I can’t solve their pain. I can only listen and reserve a place for them in the cemetery. The most gentle design of the game is that the “completion” of each undead is not ascended to heaven, but after confiding, the body becomes a little more solid — as if the weight is lighter after the memory is shared.
But the world under the mountain is changing. The sound of human logging is getting closer and closer, and the chimney of the factory stands up like a black tombstone. As the only cat that can shuttle between life and death, I became an intermediary: bringing the worries of the forest to the cemetery, and the warning of the undead to the living. Sometimes it is to help the field mouse family deliver the news of relocation, and sometimes it is to remind the fox to avoid the new traps. Class is presented in the most natural way: stray dogs straighten their chests when talking about the alms of the bakery, while laboratory mice dare not approach any brick building so far.
With the reincarnation of the four seasons, the cemetery has become a stronghold against forgetting. We held a collective funeral for the cleared forest and built a crown mound for the extinct flower species. When the bulldozer finally drove to the foot of the mountain, all the animals — alive, dead, translucent — gathered at the highest point of the cemetery. There was no fight, we just started to sing. Those songs of lifetime, songs of hometown, and improvised songs of hope. In the song, the human machine turned off inexplicably, and the driver scratched his head and left.
At the end of the game, spring came again. Unseen flowers bloomed in the cemetery, the new undead brought a brand-new story, and my fur was almost invisible in the sun. I still don’t know the meaning of resurrection, but I know that every fallen leaf remembered makes the hill a little higher.
After quitting the game, the city outside the window was silent. _Revenant Hill_ didn’t give me a great revelation. It gave me a pair of cat eyes. Through them, I see that every life — no matter how short or humble — deserves to be placed on a hill, remembered by the wind, and gently covered by the leaves of grass. And the so-called eternity may be like this: in the soil of collective memory, there is always a place for you to retain the taste you originally liked.
