PLAY
Birth
Madison Karrh’s puzzle adventure begins with a classic morning routine. Put on a cassette of soothing music, pour yourself a cup of coffee, take one last look at yourself in the mirror – and, of course, grab a broken spine off the shelf, remembering to insert the loose vertebrae before stuffing it into your backpack and heading out. Karrh’s previous game, Landlord Of The Woods, saw a young woman grappling with the anxieties of falling behind her peers, and this comes from a similar place of emotional unease. While it’s explicitly about the loneliness of moving to a big city – that spine is the first part of the protagonist’s quest to Frankenstein herself a partner, a grim but strangely wholesome DIY solution to solitude – Birth might also, by dint of timing and its creator’s perceptiveness, be the first great pandemic game.