#thepixelhunt

Bury Me, My Love is a text-based game about the journey of a Syrian refugee into Europe. Nour attempts to immigrate to France with guidance from her husband Majd to escape the tragedies of the Syrian civil war. This isn’t a single tale though as many paths can be taken leading to 27 different endings depending on how you choose to advise Nour as Majd. The game is played through a simple text messaging interface where you respond to Nour’s progress to France via limited emoji and text options. Gameplay-wise this title does not have much going for it with limited choices and many of the paths converging into the same story beats, but the emotional impact of Nour’s story makes this an easy recommendation. 

When Bury Me, My Love went on sale for $1 the premise quickly interested me as I am first-generation born in the United States. Although I don’t know the full story, I do know that my mother had a tough journey from Colombia to the United States where multiple things could have gone wrong, potentially fatally. As my mother had to immigrate alone, so does Nour in the story of Bury Me, My Love. Majd postpones leaving Syria to care for his parents that would not be able to make the trip leaving Nour to do it alone. This single decision, made before the start of the game, foreshadows many of the difficult decisions that are made by refugees attempting to leave a war-ridden country. Within the first couple of minutes issues begin to arise where you, as Majd, advise Nour to pay more than the agreed price to a shady taxi driver, or change plans completely with her going to a different city. My brain instantly began to think of everything that could go wrong with both options. If Nour spends this much more now will she run out of money before making it to France? Will going to this other city delay her even longer from leaving the region, or put her in a more dangerous place? Reluctantly, I chose to have Nour pay the cab driver more and stick with the plan. Anxiously, I would help Nour make many more decisions as she would not always listen to my advice leading to a horrible first ending. Despite not getting a good ending on my first playthrough, the ending of each run is the true gem of this game. Each ending has a unique audio clip from Nour that is spectacularly voice acted and really punches you with the emotional weight of the anxiety, fear, joy, and second-guessing that occurs throughout that specific journey. I’ll likely never see Nour again. My father may have never seen my mother again. 

I can highly recommend Bury Me, My Love, just not on the Nintendo Switch. Throughout my two playthroughs I kept thinking to myself that it would be so much more impactful if I could have a delay in text responses from Nour to further build the anxiety that would be felt while waiting for her to reply. In many cases an issue would arise and within 30 seconds we were talking about a different topic as the conversation moved along so fast on the Switch.  After looking into this game some more I came to find out that the mobile version of this title provides just this with text messages coming in in real time. Can you imagine having a loved one message you right before she is going to cross a border and then radio silence for three days? I never want to experience this in real life, I do with this game. For me, there were also many performance issues with multiple crashes at the start of the story during both playthroughs. With the text messages coming in so fast, I would receive one towards the end of that day and it would instantly jump to the next day before I could read the message. Yes, you can go back and read the prior messages, but I also had difficulty opening the prior tabs at times. My biggest complaint though about Bury Me, My Love is how little dialogue choices you have. About 70% of the texts you will send Nour are a choice of three emojis. I am sure that my choice of emoji affected the outcome of Nour’s journey, but I have no way of knowing in what way. It seems extremely lazy on the writer’s part and is the equivalent of that friend that responds “K” to everything. If there are to be any future installments I would like there to be more dialogue choices with only the occasional emojis, and I would hope for more audio clips throughout the story, not just the end.