“A Butterfly” Game Recommendation — bittersweet poem

Have you found yourself agonizing over something? A person, a moment, maybe just the fact you don’t know what’s “beyond”. The uncertainty starts to weigh heavily on your chest, and dread seems to fill the lungs with a dense cloud of doubt.

We all have faced a moment of truth during our lives. Maybe more than once. Perhaps too many times. It can feel cathartic to rise above the occasion, but it can also be devastating to be left with nothing but scars and a fear of failure.

When I played the game A Butterfly, by alienmelon, I found myself ruminating a lot on that limbo between the problem and the result. The time in which you feel stuck, paralyzed, even frozen in time, unable to do anything more than suffer whatever irks you right now.

It may be a mundane, simple discomfort, or you might be enduring the deepest, most horrific pain you’ve ever known. It could be anything in between, too.

Crisis brings change, and pain begets transformation. What happens when we’re unable to change? When our hand trembles and giving finality to our plight seems undoable? Be it for love, fear, or just our auto-perceived weakness, we sometimes give up before doing what we know we have to do.

That in-between becomes its little version of hell, just for us. A space where moving forward, taking flight, seems simply undoable. Unattainable. Impossible. We’ll be here forever, this is where it all ends.

People can emerge from a crisis stronger, more beautiful, and wiser. They can also emerge broken, undone, unrecognizable. For all the frozen hellscape that inaction begets, the end is usually unavoidable. You’re just delaying the moment of truth…

… and sometimes it can be better to face it all yourself rather than just letting trouble catch you off-guard.

A Butterfly is a short interactive poem where you explore a strange wasteland as a wonderful winged creature able to rise above the frozen remains of people. As you follow the lights around, you start to understand the kinds of tribulations that might push someone toward this kind of limbo.

The game’s surreal, glitchy aesthetic makes for a foreboding atmosphere that combines the stillness of the void with a sense of impending catharsis as you fly around the scenery.

You’ll be occasionally interrupted by strange minigames that let you move around and interact with… people? Ideas? Souls? And maybe reflect on what they are, and how they ended up here.

Once A Butterfly is finished, you may find yourself with a sense of uncertainty. You’ve finished the game, but something just doesn’t seem complete.

Completeness is too much of an ask, though… A crisis rarely ends up feeling like a proper wrapped-up finale. It just ends. You did it. And you try to move on, find something else that fills you.

I pray you emerge like a butterfly, ready to bat your wings and soar into a new sky. If you’re not there yet… don’t worry. We get to change every day, in big and small ways.

You can buy A Butterfly on Steam by clicking here.

You can see more of our games coverage here.

Author: Walker M

Aspiring game developer and hobbyist writer. Perpetually doing too much. Chronically burnt out.

Argentinian. Passionate. Unbearable?

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