Review of the Birth: a fun puzzle game about death and decay

Point-and-click puzzle game by solo developer Madison Karrh Born really caught me off guard. From the look of the screenshots, I was expecting a horror story in the style of little misfortune or the palace of france, but Birth is much more introspective instead. Sure, it’s a game about death, decay, and loneliness, but it’s told in the lightest and most authentic way possible. Its themes are heavy, but the game couldn’t be lighter. I don’t know how it works, but strangely enough, Birth is the silliest yet scariest game I’ve ever played.

In it, you play as a lonely soul who decides to make friends, but instead of joining a murder mystery book club or an online chat room to share knitting patterns, they decide to make friends from scratch. – Frankenstein style. Leaving the house, you can wander around the shops, cafes, museums and apartments to find puzzles to solve, in return for organs and bones.

Looking for hidden body parts isn’t really my thing on a day out, but this city is unlike any I’ve seen before. Like the rest of the game, it’s cute and creepy: Coraline meets Alice in Wonderland meets the plague doctor’s medical textbook. The inhabitants of this city are strange beaked creatures, with gaping eyes and exposed bones, and although they look like they’re walking around on the shelves in Hot Themes, they’re all behave fairly normally and do normal things. like wearing warm sweaters and hanging out in cute cafes. It’s both foreign and familiar, which is exactly how I see the world if I’m feeling alone in a big city.

When you poke your mouse in the nooks and crannies of the city, you’ll find some puzzles. They vary in simplicity, from small interactive images, such as clicking on an egg to crack it to reveal a twisted rabbit body inside, to small brain teasers, like figuring out how many teeth, acorns, and spiders someone wants in their tea. There are also some scenes… based on physics? They’re not really puzzles, but fun, awkward interactions. On one occasion I tried to carefully pour some pebbles from a beaker into a jar, but used too much force and caused a funny little hail of tiny stones. However, the salesman didn’t seem to mind my antics.

With no distracting dialogue or text, this comforting puzzle-solving coupled with a soothing music loop eases you into a flow-like state as you play. That’s what Ed also realized during his brief meeting with Birth at . Summer Game Festival. It’s a very light game even if you’re constantly messing around with bones, eyeballs, bugs, and loose teeth.

Sure, body parts and decomposition can be a little gross at times, but I appreciate the unusual sense of humor over the raw. In one part, there’s a key in an open wound on someone’s forearm, so you need to press on the wound so it’s big enough to get the key out – and each time you press it, it pops up. made a strange creaking sound like someone’s footsteps. on a wet Victoria sponge.

So the birth is funny and grim in its own right, but it’s also incredibly emotional. As I travel around the city, I notice that everyone pairs up with a lover or friend in some way: cuddling up on a park bench, playing board games together, or viewing artwork in the garden. exhibition room. Everyone had someone. Even those who are alone at first glance will have a cute couple taking a selfie as their phone wallpaper or a framed photo of their mate in their home.

That nagging loneliness is a bittersweet perception that I’m sure many of us have felt; I mean we’ve got two years of a global pandemic to thank for, and finding emotional pockets of adult life is something Karrh is very good at. Their previous game Landlord Of The Woods struggled with a lack of motivation and sense of some feeling in their twenties, and I’m impressed with that.

And like Landlord Of The Woods, Birth is a sweet, short game that feels incredibly human, though it depicts a world that, at first glance, couldn’t be that far from the world of we.