So the GOTY season came and went, and with the results posted, I came to the sad conclusion that I was apparently the only one who voted for Bury Me, My Love. In the chance that this is not because everyone thought it was ho-hum, but more because nobody heard of it, I want to advertise this game a little (disclaimer: I don't know anyone who made it).
The game is funded by ARTE, and is a mostly text-based adventure revolving around the refugee crisis. It got nominated for the Games for Impact award at The Game Awards: http://thegameawards.com/awards/#games-for-impact. It got featured on Kotaku and Polygon etc. but apparently the game has not really sold that well.
I find it to be really great at what it does. This is a game that is especially poignant for Europeans I think, who have been missing the human, empathetic element in the discourse around the refugee crisis. After all, most of the news and related discussions don't go much deeper than cold numbers, inflammatory images and angry Facebook posts.
Bury Me, My Love plays out in a Whatsapp-like messaging interface, and the messages you send and receive happen in pseudo-realtime, as you play Majd, a Syrian stuck in Homs, who talks to Nour, his girlfriend who flees the country and tries to reach Germany. There are two really neat things about this setup. One, it has a lot of credibility as it kind of slots in your life very naturally. You're probably checking and texting on your phone multiple times a day already, but now you also get messages from this Nour character. Very soon you're kind of forgetting that it's a game. More importantly, it's not just about the story being told, but also the absence of story when Nour is not responding. Ever experience your loved one going abroad for work or something, and then (s)he says (s)he met some cool people who are going to take him/her to a club. So you say awesome, have fun! Only that text message goes unread. So later you ask how it was, but you get no reply. Now it's 4am and you're lying awake thinking what the hell happened and surely they'd check their phone before going to sleep? Well, it's like that. Only in this case she's at the end of her wits and saying she's going to walk through a live minefield, and you shout at her for being stupid, and she gets angry and turns off her phone. And now you have to wait for a day in real time to see if she made it out alive.
So this game is like that. If you're interested, do check it out. It's on iOS and Android and only costs $3. Apparently it has 19 different endings depending on how you react and what kind of advice you give. Ranging from happy to really sad. I think I'm approaching my ending after a little over a week. I'm hopeful. If people finished it we can talk about our endings in spoiler tags.
http://burymemylove.arte.tv/
The game is funded by ARTE, and is a mostly text-based adventure revolving around the refugee crisis. It got nominated for the Games for Impact award at The Game Awards: http://thegameawards.com/awards/#games-for-impact. It got featured on Kotaku and Polygon etc. but apparently the game has not really sold that well.
I find it to be really great at what it does. This is a game that is especially poignant for Europeans I think, who have been missing the human, empathetic element in the discourse around the refugee crisis. After all, most of the news and related discussions don't go much deeper than cold numbers, inflammatory images and angry Facebook posts.
Bury Me, My Love plays out in a Whatsapp-like messaging interface, and the messages you send and receive happen in pseudo-realtime, as you play Majd, a Syrian stuck in Homs, who talks to Nour, his girlfriend who flees the country and tries to reach Germany. There are two really neat things about this setup. One, it has a lot of credibility as it kind of slots in your life very naturally. You're probably checking and texting on your phone multiple times a day already, but now you also get messages from this Nour character. Very soon you're kind of forgetting that it's a game. More importantly, it's not just about the story being told, but also the absence of story when Nour is not responding. Ever experience your loved one going abroad for work or something, and then (s)he says (s)he met some cool people who are going to take him/her to a club. So you say awesome, have fun! Only that text message goes unread. So later you ask how it was, but you get no reply. Now it's 4am and you're lying awake thinking what the hell happened and surely they'd check their phone before going to sleep? Well, it's like that. Only in this case she's at the end of her wits and saying she's going to walk through a live minefield, and you shout at her for being stupid, and she gets angry and turns off her phone. And now you have to wait for a day in real time to see if she made it out alive.
So this game is like that. If you're interested, do check it out. It's on iOS and Android and only costs $3. Apparently it has 19 different endings depending on how you react and what kind of advice you give. Ranging from happy to really sad. I think I'm approaching my ending after a little over a week. I'm hopeful. If people finished it we can talk about our endings in spoiler tags.
http://burymemylove.arte.tv/
