Alghrab pits you against a mouthy crow at the bird’s own card game. Win and you get a prophecy. Lose, and it’ll relentlessly tease you.
In the realm of digital games with alt controllers, there are often a lot of strange and creative things to be explored. At GDC, there is a massive Alt Control section that is always fun to explore. One of the games that drew me in was Alghrab, which showcased a talking crow inside a cage.
Now, I am not going to pretend I know exactly what was going on in this game, but this bird was spitting riddles, trying to get you to pick from three cards in front of you. There is some sort of prophecy, a bunch of playing cards, and lots of this bird making fun of you for whatever reason. Maybe it’s my lack of knowledge as to what was going on that made the bird able to pick on me!
Using cards, you can decide if the bird is telling the truth or not, then agree with the bird or decide if something is a bit bigger or a bit smaller than how they said. It’s an interesting concept, but watching this animatronic bird move, talk, and jeer at you was really captivating – I’d not played a game before that had such a realistic, moving bird so willing to actually play around with you. It was so cool.
Will I ever know what the crow wants in Alghrab? Probably not. But will I remember the experience for the rest of my life? Yes. And I will keep telling people about the time that a robot crow was far smarter than me, and knew it the entire time, as I randomly selected cards and tried to get this crow to actually tell me what was going on.
You can keep up with Alghrab and it’s developments through the developer’s site.
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