Earlier this month, Sam Leigh of Blinking Birch Video games dropped two long-awaited releases: Dying of the Writer and The World We Left Behind. Designer of the genre-pushing, Ennie-nominated solo RPG Anamnesis — a tarot-based journaling sport about reminiscence and id — Leigh’s work is commonly a contemplative meditation on a given theme, with these latest releases delving into isolation, historical past, company, and hubris.
The World We Left Behind is a GMless sport that asks gamers to tackle the position of cosmic researchers discovering a post-society planet. All through a number of journeys to a single alien planet, these astronauts stroll among the many overgrown ruins of a as soon as nice tradition, uncovering it’s previous whereas finding out the crops and animals that also inhabit the ecosystem.
Performed utilizing a single deck of playing cards, the sport leaves behind sport artifacts as gamers take notes and draw symbols on the playing cards, which compound with every subsequent session. The sport’s surrealist pastel paintings was made by Helena Santana, with the sport’s structure by Sinta Posadas.
Commissioned by the New York Metropolis-based Ballet Collective for his or her 2023 season, The World We Left Behind has been in improvement for a number of years. The preliminary sport was made in collaboration with composer Phong Tran and choreographer Troy Schumacher. Tran and Schumacher playtested early variations of The World We Left Behind and created a ballet of the identical identify impressed by their classes, which premiered final fall in New York Metropolis’s Trinity Commons and was revived for a second efficiency earlier this yr. A restricted version field set is out there on The World We Left Behind Bandcamp web page, alongside Tran’s unique compositions.
Leigh’s second launch, Dying of The Writer follows within the tarot-based custom of Anamnesis. Constructing on comparable themes to Dillin Apelyan’s Metalepsis, Leigh makes use of the cardboard’s archetypes to depict a battle between a fictional character and the creator who wrote them.
Dying of the Writer takes place all through 5 chapters of play, because the character rejects the story their creator has written for them. Because the narrative modifications beneath their pen, the creator could retaliate, forcing this fictional actuality to bend to their whims, resulting in an final confrontation between the creator and their creation. Dying of The Writer’s greyscale, horror-inspired tarot paintings was accomplished by Victor Winter, with structure by James Hanna and enhancing by Marx Shepherd.
I’ve had the chance to play the solo iteration of each of the video games, although Dying of the Writer has choices for two-person play, whereas The World We Left Behind can accommodate as much as 5 gamers. Very like Leigh’s earlier video games, these two video games supply emotionally shifting experiences, which is unsurprising from the designer behind the solo TTRPG that launched a thousand solo TTRPGs. Dying of the Writer’s tarot-prompts focusing extra on the connection to particular person company and creation, which is able to particularly attraction to creatives and writers. The World We Left Behind’s gradual unravelling of the solitude of journey, alongside the thriller that’s this alien planet’s historical past, is a contemplation concerning the state of our world and what it may be like as soon as we too are left behind.