Birth is an adventure game about constructing a creature from spare bones & organs found around the city in order to quell your loneliness.

This fascinating puzzle adventure by Madison Karrh delves into the idea of mortality and loneliness through beautiful, light puzzles. The focus of the game involves building your own companion from spare organs and bones you can find throughout the game, gathered by solving charming puzzles with skeletal characters and environments.

Birth’s Creator, Madison, has spoken about how the game was created during one of the loneliest periods of many people’s lives – during the COVID-19 lockdown. During that time, her feelings of loneliness were magnified by her living solo in a small studio apartment, and ‘Birth’ serves to create an experience inspiring more day-to-day conversation around loneliness.

Whilst the game does focus on some of the bigger, more intimidating themes of human life, it acts as a gentle reminder for players that loneliness is a feeling that we all experience, and is not one we need to endure alone.

This theme was not the original concept for the game, but manifested as development continued, as Madison has mentioned in another interview; “I was trying to come up with ideas of why the character in the game would want to build a body,” she says. “And then I was like, ‘Wait, why do I want to make a game about someone building a body? I was like, ‘Oh, because I’m very lonely and I haven’t touched another human for a long, long time.”

Many players have compared the experience to how they felt at another time in their life, reminiscing on a distant lonely time, or confronting a more recent one. Birth serves as a compelling yet passive example of how games can evoke universally human feelings through the combination of gameplay, music and aesthetic.