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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 Trailer
Birth is almost wordless. It’s hand-drawn with confident black lines, a restrained color 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.
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.
These discrete puzzles are slotted together in the various parts of a city, drawn in ancient textbook sepia, face-on, like an Ellen Raskin illustration or a New Yorker cover, that you ghost back and forth through, visiting the library, the bakery, the art studio, and onwards.
There are other people in these places you visit, as hollowed out themselves as the shucked skull of a pomegranate that you can explore in one quietly magical sequence at the very heart of the game. You are doing these people favors – or are you?
The soundtrack is mournful and unsettling. There’s a version of Holst’s I Vow to Thee, My Country that sounds like it was recorded at midnight in a haunted storm drain. Bees seem to buzz over an organ treatment of the Gymnopedies, and elsewhere there’s a funereal shopping mall rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh, one of his more doomy works in the first place.
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