News - Where Birds Go to Sleep

Last night we played our demo live and talked about development, lore, behind the scenes and designs! This was our first time streaming, apologies for the occasional technical difficulties!

It was a lot fun and we hope to stream sometime in the future.

Here's a playlist of the most interesting excerpts cut together from the livestream where we discuss designs, lore, development and more, as well as a bunch of answer questions:

And here's the livestream in full:

The content rich, spiritually moving, fully voice acted demo of Where Birds Go to Sleep is available on Steam right now until the end of November, with 13 Steam achievements, showcasing our take on "secrets" - meaningful side content, about 30-45 mins playtime depending on how thorough the player is.

The demo also has a Linux build and works on the Steam Deck also (do note however, that we currently do not do testing on Linux - but it has been reported by players that they were able to play through seamlessly and without technical difficulties.)

If you haven't played it already, we hope you'll give it a go and let us know what you think.
If you have, thank you; and we hope you'll tell your friends to play it too! 🎉

You may not think you make a difference, but you absolutely do! Any word of mouth you can spread is a massive help (and moral boost) to us. Every single time we watch you play through the demo, we learn something new. Every single feedback sent in is greatly appreciated!

THANK YOU!

Last but not least, here is one of the playthroughs of our demo. There are multiple endings to most scenes, so this is just a small portion of what it all entails!

Our demo for Where Birds Go to Sleep is now available for a short while on our Steam page until the 20th, featuring "SECRETS", our take on optional content and exploration. They're all very well-integrated, authored and worthwhile - some of them are hidden very well!

We would love to hear about your experiences with it, what you liked, what you didnt like, if you found anything confusing, if you encountered problems etc, you can use the ingame feedback form to do that, or post to this thread on the Steam forums. Alternatively, you can join our Discord server for further discussions!

We hope you have a great time with it!

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Linux gamers, you are not forgotten! We're currently experiencing difficulties trying to build for Linux, but we will investigate further, and hopefully by the next time we make our demo available, it can be also available on Linux.

The Big Adventure Event
We are very excited to announce that we'll partake in the THE BIG ADVENTURE EVENT, a Steam Festival that focuses some great on adventure games (naturally, none as great as ours), come take a look on January 20-24th! Check out the event page here.

Website Update!
An update has hit our website, and there are secrets hidden in plain sight now. There may be some on our Steam store page, or even in this update! The mystery will reveal itself only to the most sensitive observers.

Demo Soon!
There's a playable demo in the works! A short part of the game featuring all the core features, condensed into a self-contained little story. More details to come later.

Sign Up For Our Newsletter!
Sign up for our newsletter to be amongst the first to play the demo! We will use newsletters very sparingly, only to share the most important news!

Come Join Us on Discord!
If you are interested in Where Birds Go to Sleep, game development and/ or game design-related discussions, come join our Discord server!

You Can Help!
If you'd like to support our work, we would be grateful if you could wishlist the game if you haven't already, and share info about it to your friends and on social media, it helps us a ton!

Sneak Peeks!
Here is a very short gameplay preview - we made this for the festival application, the requirement was 10 second, but here's a slightly longer version of this. We're working on showing off a bigger chunk soon:

Last but not least, below is new artwork from the game, an early repressed memory, hidden in a corner. Can you see it?

"The scent of myrrh is writ into your mind from early childhood. The many books, the mischief and the following punishment smells of scented incense, a rather bittersweet memory. It awakens old questions you forgot the answers to."

This is a shortened version of one of our articles, you can read the full, unshortened version here.

There is something very curious and special happening when we interpret a story. For the remainder of this article, please accept that “story” is much more than a summary of events, it is the rhythm of life as humans see it – a beginning and an end.

We have an innate understanding of story from early childhood, which we acquire from observing life. Despite sounding very lofty and philosophical, this is a very grounded and pragmatic view.

The story in video games is not in audio logs, cutscenes, phone-calls or never-ending text dumps of exhaustive codexes. It happens in the player's head, where he interprets and abstracts, along with his moment-to-moment decisions and emotions.

It is also not only the “plot”, it is also the tempo, the rhythm, the speed, the emotions as well as the gameplay. So many video games have their video and game parts undermining each other at every opportunity: a character might have an emotional breakdown after killing a person in a cutscene, even though the player has killed dozens already in their current play session - the game asks us to kindly ignore the game part, which is the only part separating the game from a movie, and to focus on the video part, while the “story” takes place.

The video part of a video game can have an excellent story with great dialogues, graphics and camerawork. The gameplay might make the player enraged, stressed, exhausted, horrified or satisfied. But unless these elements work in tandem, conjoined in the player's brain, video games cannot tell a story unique to its medium.

We wouldn't call a video which would consist of scrolling text a good movie to watch, no matter how good a story the text would tell.

We wouldn't call a book filled with musical notes a good book to read, even though the music it describes might sound heavenly when played.

The story in the video part of a game might be great, the game's gameplay might be fantastic, but that's simply a good video and a good game – not a good video game.