RISING STAR AWARD IF FOUND

We were spoiled for fantastic debuts this year: Paradise Killer, Necrobarista, Röki, Signs Of The Sojourner and HoloVista among them. The future looks bright indeed. But the brightest star of all was undoubtedly Dreamfeel’s interactive graphic novel If Found, which follows a young transgender woman as she tries to reconcile her present with her past. Her strongest instinct is to destroy the latter – and so you’re presented with her hand-illustrated and annotated diary, and find yourself erasing it sentence by sentence, sketch by sketch, page by page.

This mechanic alone is immediately evocative of Dreamfeel’s creative convictions as a studio: simple and satisfying, yet layered with meaning depending on the context it’s placed in, it is handled with the utmost care – and invites players to do the same in turn. Consigning Kasio’s prickly family members to the dispassionate void is an act imbued with sadness and anger, but transitioning between scenes by sweeping away the night sky to reveal the bright blue of a crisp Irish morning underneath feels like a fresh start. That there is so much depth to a single type of interaction is testament to If Found’s creators’ talent for storytelling, for elegantly framing and reframing different perspectives.

Along the way, there’s confusion: a parallel universe with a hungry black hole that’s creeping into reality, an astronaut trying desperately to make contact, memories bleeding into other memories as you attempt to make sense of the palimpsest of this girl’s life and identity. But ultimately, Kasio’s tale is an ode to getting to know who you truly are, and the process of figuring out how you present that identity to the world. It is a wonderfully assured mission statement from one of the most exciting new studios in quite some time – one that is destined to be a lodestar for the industry and beyond.