In Madison Karrh’s new point-and-click game, birth follows death. You are lonely in the city, so you wander about, finding bones and organs and then using them to construct a makeshift friend. It would be a Frankenstein story, if it ever felt even slightly gothic. Instead, it’s so much better. It feels strange and personal, like being privy to someone’s daydreams. Birth follows death: this has the backwards logic of daydreams for starters, topsy-turviness echoing out and finding purchase and expression in the ways that the stuff of the game – feathers, dandelions, pottery pieces, bird skulls – are both worthless and also sort of priceless in the right hands, and in the way that your ultimate goal is both impossible and heart-rendingly essential.
Birth is almost wordless. It’s hand-drawn with confident black lines, a restrained colour scheme, and a deftness when it comes to the wizened, broken and deserted. Old wrists, empty teacups, laundry silently tumbling in a dryer. It’s a puzzle game, I guess, although it’s too thoughtful, too thought provoking, to ever settle into a single genre for long. It’s a reminder that beneath genre every game is ultimately itself, existing in a genre of one. You earn your bones and organs by playing dominos, completing jigsaws, mastering hex games and even doing a little inventory Tetris. Not all the activities have such clear logic, though, and that feels like a strength here. Birth is ready to bypass logic and meet you somewhere a bit deeper.
You get to piece together the contents of a fish tank, and nose through the shelves of a bookcase. The actual games you play in Birth always feel secondary to the sense of exploring, or perhaps prying is closer to it – looking through other people’s stuff, prodding at their private worlds as if they were a collection of Activity Bears. At one moment – my favourite – I pressed the keys of an old manual typewriter and plants grew from the chattering innards of the machine. It now feels like a rare failing in manual typewriters that they don’t all do this.
Source – eurogamer.net
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