Glancing at this image, you probably wouldn’t guess that the story being told is one of intergenerational Holocaust trauma. Drawingfamily, and his wife’s, the game applies a fictional filter in order to “respect our relatives’ ownership over their stories,” Tóth Ridovics says. The result is a game whose “narrative and visual language is magical realism,” he explains – not to soften the blow of historical facts at all, but rather to get at the reality of how this feels for protagonist Áron, the grandson of Holocaust survivors. Here, for example, Áron is preparing for a conversation with a plant which grows out of a cabinet that his grandmother always keeps closed – just one of the metaphorical monsters “who help [the player] or divert them from solving the narrative puzzles of the game”. Yes, this is – in part –a detective game, complete with deduction mechanics that let you aid Áron as he pieces together his family’s memories and secrets. Developer Chimera Tales is still early in its own investigations – it’s targeting a 2024 release for on PC, with consoles potentially to follow.
