Bury Me, My Love
Developer The Pixel Hunt, Figs Publisher Ico Media Format Android, iOS (tested) Release Out now
Android, iOS
We haven’t had a text from our wife in three hours. Normally, we wouldn’t be too worried, but last we heard, she was about to cross the Evros river in an inflatable canoe. In Bury Me, My Love, we are Majd, whose wife, Nour, has left their war-torn homeland for the safety of Europe. It’s the story of a Syrian refugee, told not through newspaper articles, but through an interactive instant-messaging conversation: selfies, abbreviations, emojis and all.
The use of the format is Bury Me, My Love’s masterstroke. It makes the faceless story of thousands suddenly intimate. This fictional relationship is implanted into your real digital life: the app sends push notifications to your phone, texts from Nour sitting next to messages from other contacts. There’s a natural rhythm to your ongoing conversation, as exchanges of various lengths play out in pseudo-realtime. A six-hour gap in the story while Nour sleeps in a grubby hotel, or underneath a disused train, might only mean a couple of hours’ worth of anxious glances at your phone.
You’ll be glad of that condensed timeframe – the waiting is the hardest part. Thanks to the convincing presentation (the WhatsApp-like interface even lets the couple swap ‘pictures’, realised as sketches) and relatable writing, it becomes oddly difficult to mentally separate this exchange from real long-distance communications. Interactions range from funny, to heartbreaking, to strained, as you tap to send texts or choose replies.
Most often, the couple’s chats are wonderfully mundane. Majd, you come to learn, is a bit of a history nerd; Nour is excitable and headstrong, with a wicked sense of humour. Some awkward phrasing can niggle, as does the realisation that our tapping at the Reply box isn’t required to send texts: apart from branching dialogue choices, conversations play automatically. It robs the game a little of its already limited interactivity – and, by association, its sense of immersion.
Despite elements of choice and multiple endings, Bury Me, My Love appears content-light as soon as the second playthrough, since conversations repeat. If you return, it’ll likely be for the quality of the vignettes, and the lure of seeing more. One where Nour is followed by a group of neo-Nazis is frantic, while another sequence involving a stuffed rabbit is masterfully paced – and if, like us, you encourage your wife to cross the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy, the stress of waiting for a reply could well derail your work day. After that, it’s not a stretch to imagine how it might disrupt a life, a family, an entire country. That’s Bury Me, My Love’s achievement: that a series of simulated text messages can rival a lifetime’s worth of headlines.