Promesa takes you to a realm created by a grandparent sharing stories with their grandchild, letting you wander through a place created by imagining these spoken experiences.
Stories furnish places for themselves in my mind as I listen to them. A part of me likes to shape these stories into an imagined place I can look through and explore, seeing the event as the person describes it. It’s a strange act, as I often have no idea what anyone looks like outside of the storyteller, nor do I often know what these places look like, but my mind tries to give them a shape and form even without any information to create them with. It’s like I need to visualize the spaces as I listen, creating a strange kind of space/movie out of the story.
This game builds on that kind of feeling, drawing on the developer’s memories of their grandparent’s stories and shaping an explorable space with them. It makes for an intimate journey as you meander through these streets and rooms, as it feels like you’re sharing in someone’s actual memories instead of inhabiting an interpretation of these places. This creates an interesting mixture, as you’re exploring an interpretation of things while drawing your own sense of the story from them, shaping your own takeaways from the narrative and place and creating yet another connected, yet unique, universe.
Promesa is an incredible look at how we take the stories we hear and shape them within our minds and hearts, creating worlds carved from our own impressions and ideas of these tales and what they mean to us.
Promesa is available now on itch.io and Steam.
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