What mysteries lurk in all that ocean water? If Like Gulls Crying At The Dawn is something to go by, you won’t truly wish to discover out. On its floor, it’s a game about discovering washed up messages from a shipwrecked traveller, however, similar to the ocean, there are currents of deeper themes beneath. It additionally has much less tortured metaphors than I do.
Though day by day consists of the identical routine of going exterior, studying the message that’s been drawn in by the tide, and returning to the protection of the lighthouse, there’s an actual sense of time passing. The climate adjustments. Colours come and go: the gray of a storm, the pink of a dawn. Birds dance on the horizon, or don’t.
Going again inside prompts a brand new picture to seem, one which took me a few viewings to grasp was a ship approaching a lighthouse, creeping nearer with day by day. It’s the attribute tiny, low-pixel depend Bitsy sprites that make it not instantly apparent, however that’s not a criticism. The sudden second of readability breaking by in a game that’s very a lot centred on anticipation of the unknown couldn’t come from many different engines.
It additionally serves to make you much more interested in what is going to occur when that raft lastly arrives, which I gained’t spoil. It’s not shocking, although, that developer Kstull (like many Bitsy builders) describes the game as a poem; its conclusion and the fantastic thing about the writing all through imply that it couldn’t be the rest.
You can play Like Gulls Crying At The Dawn free of charge in your browser on itch.io.
