Birth

Birth is a short point-and-click puzzle adventure about being lonely in a large city. You live alone, you don't know anyone, and the solution your character arrives at is to build a creature out of spare bones and organs scavenged from the buildings around you — a partner, a wet warm heart, a collection of bones — to keep you company. The premise is delivered with a tonal lightness that the subject matter wouldn't necessarily suggest.

Most of the game is observation. The world is rendered in fine hand-drawn detail across museums, coffee shops, alleys, flower shops, libraries, markets, bakeries, post offices and apartments that don't belong to you, and the puzzles are mostly hidden in the personal belongings and incidental scenery of those locations. Picking up spare bones and organs as you go — they appear in places they probably shouldn't — slowly gives your creature shape. Other small creatures populate the city, each strange in their own specific way, and several short conversations open up the longer you spend in a single place.

Physics-based puzzles layer on top of the observational ones, and hidden tokens scattered across the city can be collected and spent to find further secrets. The tone is quiet and unforced — the game isn't trying to scare or unsettle so much as to articulate what it feels like to live among strangers and decide what to do about it. The whole thing runs short, which is the right length for what it's trying to express.