Birth review – make your soulmate from spare bones and organs

Into the city you go, not to find fame or fortune but a body. In Birth, you solve puzzles to collect the bones and organs that make a human being – a partner, even. Chicago-based designer Madison Karrh’s Sunday afternoon puzzle adventure game feels at once fiercely contemporary and also like the work of a Weimar-era experimental artist, where every person’s head is represented by an animal skull.

Each location – the antique shop, the apothecary, the laundromat, the museum and more – represents a series of simple, textless puzzles themed around the establishment. In the bakery, for example, you must arrange slices of banana on a piece of bread in the “correct” order. The puzzles are tactile; with your cursor you prod at objects scattered on tables, or resting on shelves, moving them to reveal clues as to how things fit together – or break apart.

Karrh says she is inspired by “libraries, bugs, bones and decay”, and there’s something of the old museum to these spaces and puzzles, which have you rifling through musty drawers and sticking the wings back on to insects. Each discrete puzzle forms part of a longer sequence, the successful completion of which yields a new human body part: a tooth, perhaps, or a hand, a pair of lungs or a wet heart. You play to a soundtrack of polyphonic synth versions of classical pieces that give the ambience of a Tokyo cafe.

Birth is a game of symbols and sequences, of spotting the odd one out and arranging trivial things to solve profound things. It’s about the loneliness you can feel when living in a big city, but is also clearly born out of pandemic lockdowns, of the sense of disconnectedness most of us felt, and the strangeness of adjusting to reconnection. It’s a warm, empathic and melancholic quest in which simplicity makes space for meaning.