About the event Developers day Last year, several independent video games were presented that piqued our interest, some of which have already been released and have been pleasantly confirmed as high-quality products: for example, this is the case of A Little to the Left, a collection of puzzles based all of them in domestic cleaning, in the name of a zen and relaxed atmosphere. Among the products presented to the public on that occasion was also Birth, developed by a single person. madison karrh, based in Chicago, has obtained support from WINGS Interactive for Birth, a fund aimed at financing projects by women developers or belonging to marginalized categories.
After completing this very particular puzzle game, we can say that the committee of ALAS I had seen it for a long time: Karrh confirms herself as the bearer of a very original artistic style - Birth is entirely hand-drawn - that develops what was already seen in her previous work, Landlord of the Woods, an exponent of the same video game. genre and strong with 97% positive reviews on Steam. We appreciate the theme of the Birth and its riddles, light and never too complex, capable of transporting us to a surreal and gloomy world, but painted with a sweet and delicate touch.
We tell you about this curious puzzle game in ours birth review.
Building a friend
"Crowded cities fill me with loneliness". These are the first words of Birth, with which Karrh introduces us to the main theme of the game: finding a way to fill the feeling of emptiness that contemporary cities give, in which contact with others is usually essential until a few years ago. decades. ...and I still live in more modest scale settlements, it is completely lost. We can define in the initial editor the aesthetics of the protagonist of Birth, a bird-like being with a skeletal head and empty eye sockets.
As we have already mentioned, Madison Karrh's style, based on sober and colorful tones hand drawn backgrounds and characters, is one of those that are remembered. Bars, museums, painting workshops are full of humanoids with exposed bones and organs, hybridized with animals of various types, dedicated to normal human activities: admiring a painting, having a coffee, chatting with a loved one. The protagonist of the story looks for a way to build a companion to spend his time with: here we embark on an entirely urban adventure that will take us to collect bones and organs to create the friend of our dreams, crossing various environments and meeting many characters. with a crazy aesthetic.
urban puzzles
Over the course of the roughly two hours needed to complete Birth, we find ourselves entering the buildings of a fictional city to help its inhabitants solve problems small and large. We do this by facing each other puzzle often connected to each other, always short-lived and of a different nature: sometimes we put together a puzzle; Others of us play dominoes, connecting tiles with the same symbols; In others we have to tear tokens from the arms of a character busy smoking a cigarette on the balcony of his house. The clues are always visual and often require connecting objects and situations that are in the same context, without the help of texts. The situations that Karrh presents to us are often surreal, which can sometimes leave us disoriented: "ordinary" logic does not always work to guide us towards the solution. Fortunately, a few tries and a little reflection are always enough to get out of any dead end. There is no shortage of optional sections, which can be unlocked using tokens: sometimes they will take us to admire new environments, while in others they will activate the operation of elements present on the stage, such as a carousel made up of skeletal horses. They're small things, sure, but Birth is a game made exactly to enhance the beauty of what normally goes unnoticed, be it insects, entrails or a handshake with a stranger.
Thus, taking vegetables to a skeletal fruit shop, helping a pharmacist fill a vase with mysterious stones, giving a scolopendra as a bracelet to a girl or helping a character recompose his face will lead us to obtain what we are looking for: bones. and organs to create the friend of our dreams. Birth is essentially this: a sequence of puzzles aimed at achieving our objective, in which the true protagonist of the scene is the surreal and macabre vision, but at the same time sweet and relaxing, presented by Madison Karrh. It's only a pity for a final section (in which we will fix our partner) less successful than the puzzles of the first part of the game; Furthermore, in our opinion, the underlying message of Birth - the completely human need to have contacts and affections in dehumanizing contexts such as those of big cities - is not always present during the game, which does not present narrative developments and often does not . It carries, within the enigmas, the thought that is at its base.
Part of the pleasure of Birth comes from its own soundtrack, tender and gentle, and in particular the main musical theme, made of melancholy and soft synthesizer tones. Although it is a small production, there is a Translation to Spanish. In any case, there is very little text on screen and, as we have seen, Birth's main focus is solving puzzles based on visual clues, not textual ones.
Conclusions
Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Holygamerz.com 7.5 Readers (3) 6.3 your voteMadison Karrh continues the path laid out in Landlord of the Woods and further develops her artistic style, creating a puzzle game that does not drag on with unnecessary repetition, but is a well-focused product capable of getting straight to the point. We appreciate, in particular, the construction of surreal situations, but always solvable with a good spirit of observation. It's a shame that the message of Birth can't always be conveyed during the course of the puzzles; Fortunately, the sweet ending makes us forget the last section of the game, in our opinion less effective than the first part of the work. We will continue to pay attention to the works of Karrh, capable of making even the crudest skeletons tender and tender.
PRO
- Beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds and characters.
- Simple but well-constructed puzzles.
- Its brevity and its capacity for synthesis are strong points
- A very successful marriage between macabre visions and a feeling of sweetness
AGAINST
- The underlying message often doesn't come through through the mechanics.
- The final section is less successful than the first part.
