Interment

Winner of the Grand Prize at the Bristol Games Hub Global Game Jam 2023

Made in 48 hours

Interment is a short narrative puzzle game about the connection between the stories of our ancestors and the stories we make today. 

You play as a contractor for a building company who are planning to build houses on a dilapidated family graveyard. As part of the planning permission, the graves must be reinterred elsewhere with accurately named headstones.

Your job is to match the currently unreadable, old headstones to the correct person using archive material, contextual clues and whispers from the past itself.

The archive includes transcripts of documents belonging to family members buried in the graveyard, including a will, diary entry, death certificate, newspaper article, letters and even song lyrics. In these, you will get a fleeting sense of the family members’ lives and the subtleties of their relationships with one another.

With the fate of the Hawthorn family legacy in your hands, Interment asks you: what does it mean to have roots in a place? And what does it mean when these roots are severed?