Bury me, my Love 12+

I haven’t finished the game, but I’ve encountered something I don’t like so far.

I totally understand I have no control over what Nour does on the other side of the phone, but I do think I should have more control over what Majd does, because I’m playing his role.

If the designer want me to feel like I’m Majd, but doesn’t give me autonomous, instead, only give me the ability to see what happens through his eye without the ability to change anything. In my opinion, this is not good game design, even it can be good story design. I’ll never truly put myself in Majd’s shoes if I’m not allowed to make all important decisions as Majd.

So the scene makes me feel this way is when Nour wakes up late and is missing her plane. I wish I had the choice to call her.

This game is interesting in concept and well written to some extent, but it ended up railroading me into a ending that I thought I had been carefully avoiding with every choice I had made. The end result was an unsatisfying story that made no sense narratively.

At a technical level, this game presents itself as a simple text message interface which should be the easiest thing in the world for a game to implement—iOS has built in support for scrolling views after all—but it’s completely broken: attempting to scroll back to read what happened previously jitters and jumps around, text is drawn stacked on top of other text making it impossible to read, there are huge gaps between text bubbles requiring you to scroll multiple screen lengths, sometimes it is solid black, etc.

The game is basically playable but there’s no way to read the story that came before.

I’ve played similar games that simulate a chat interface and work in real time, but this game impressed me. The choices you make actually matter and appear to change the path Nour takes as she attempts to travel into Europe. The game generally checks in a few times a day and never felt annoying. You can switch it to real time if you’re more interested in flying through, but the story is better told in small chunks. It’s hard not to sympathize with Nour and the plight of many like her. I felt like I understood the situation of many refugees a little better after playing this game.