In January 1938, a Republican soldier entered a ruined building in Franco territory. Outside, the bombs ring out. As he searches through the rubble for important documents in a ruined city hall, an intimate story of love, loss and violence unfolds. Because in computer video games Letters of desirehistorical memory is explored literally since it starts from the memories of an old woman who reconstructs her parents’ past.
“In April 2024, I remembered a story from the civil war between two brothers from different camps and I was thinking of making a video game when I had the idea of focusing it on two men in love,” Carlos Royuela Torres, better known as Royu, told the newspaper. He is the idea behind this epistolary proposal launched by the studio independent Happy Break Bones, which officially debuts with a small but ambitious title.
Focusing on letters sent by Juan and Antón, two friends who share their concerns about the tension beginning to be felt in Spain, the developers describe this first-person video game as a walking simulator since the mechanics consist of traversing the rubble, solving small puzzles to advance and interacting with different objects to evoke memories that shed light on the past of these two men, who have captured in writing feelings that encapsulate much more than what they tell.
Bury me my love tells the story of a Syrian marriage in which one member of the couple attempts to emigrate to Europe to escape the war in 2015 while the other stays behind. My war It takes place during the siege of Sarajevo, but focuses on civilians surviving in extreme conditions. International video gaming has already tackled difficult topics in war contexts. For Royu, the medium brings “empathy” when it comes to dealing with such delicate issues. “Controlling it allows you to experience it more closely, because you’re not only seeing the story, you’re also a participant in it,” he says.
Despite this potential of video games, the Spanish Civil War is barely present, unlike what happens in other arts. Furthermore, the rare times this issue was raised, it was in the form of proposals for action or strategy that did not take into account the political and social dimensions of the conflict. There are exceptions, such as the metaphorical 13 rosesin which Casilda de Zulueta focuses on solving puzzles and bounded spaces, entirely in line with Letters of desireto talk about Franco’s repression.
The Happy Break Bones member believes that this lack of examples is due to two main reasons. “The first is that creating video games is very expensive and few are made in Spain. So, although it may seem ironic, it’s always a twisted question to say ‘hey, shooting people for their ideas is bad’. So there are those who don’t take risks for economic reasons,” he explains. The other reason is “what people will say”, the impact of the work and whether publishing it can rank a studio. “For fear of not wanting to get wet, teams are not going in that direction,” Cabila said.
Censored stories
In the case of Letters of desire historical memory is also memory weirdBecause, even if “LGBTIQA+ people have always existed”, the developer “had never seen this kind of diversity present during the civil war”. “Being LGBTIQA+, what could be less than giving a little representation to the group,” he continues. That is why the heart of the story is the relationship between two men, whose love cannot even be expressed due to censorship. But Royu, “fed up” with all these stories “which end in tragedy”, wants to claim the right to a happy ending: “Who better than his own daughter to tell it, because that means that they were still able to lead a good life”.
Of course, he is aware of the historical impossibility for two men to raise a daughter, even an adopted one, in the post-war period, but this is artistic license. In his mind he is very clear about how the protagonists reach this vital point, and in fact he reveals it during the interview, but in the video game it is completely open, because he believes that “when someone imagines what is happening, it is much more powerful”.
Despite small decisions that deviate from reality to convey a message, the staging is very careful. “The documentation was a bit trambotic“, he recalls with a laugh. But he managed to obtain maps of what the roads of Teruel were, his hometown and the place where the video game takes place, thanks to the Provincial Historical Archives of the city, a place where he went several times to collect materials that served as inspiration. They also visited many second-hand pages, where they were able to investigate the furniture of that era and even obtain military archives of the Republican and Fascist armies and then reproduce them faithfully.
The attention to detail is noticeable. Additionally, even though the objects are repeated in the video game and the movements are sometimes rudimentary, it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what the story is about. At the same time, they include subtle details that denote great care, such as the fact that “if you press the fire button, there is a little animation and it looks like it was blocked, in reference to the fact that many of these weapons used by the Republican side came from the Soviet Union, from the First World War, and therefore arrived defective.” It is also telling that weapons are useless Letters of nostalgia, Because in the work, the war of memory is not won at the threat of a weapon, but by making visible what we tried to bury.
The Spanish flavor that triumphs in China
The scenario of Letters of desire It was written in one night, although there was a process of collecting feedback and making improvements afterwards. They had to redo the gameplay mid-development, a week before a big event. “It was crazy,” Royu recalls of this moment, where they decided to incorporate the character of the girl as a trigger for the story and to focus more on immersion by allowing the player to be the one who must go in search of the fragments of the story, which come to life through the letters of the two lovers and the sound atmosphere that emerges when reading them.
For the soundtrack, unable to afford their own compositions, they chose to seek a royalty-free version. Memories of the Alhambra by Francisco Tarrega. From there, select other pieces by the author that suit you. All this gives a very patriotic flavor to the result, which is why it is surprising that they gave it an English title. “The code name of the project was ‘typewriter project’, so the actual title didn’t come up until almost the end, and we settled on something that when searching directly referred to the game. So it was mostly a matter of SEO misfortune, they have to find you so you don’t die among all the results pages,” reveals the creator.
This hasn’t stopped over 70% of their current players from being from Spain, which is usually not the case. Then the second country with the most sales – just ahead of the US and other English-speaking countries – is China, where Royu believes it works well because the LGBTIQA+ audience is looking for games in which they see themselves reflected. In addition, of course, there is the fact that they published the video game in Spanish, English and Chinese despite the difficulty of finding a work with so many regionalisms, in which the protagonists speak in Aragonese and Galician before the war breaks out and have to limit themselves to Spanish.
The way it was published Letters of desire This indicates a great interest in making the work accessible. This is why its price is so low, since it does not reach €3 on Steam. Royu comments that the short duration also helps in this sense, although the fact that the video game does not arrive on time stems from “the need to tell a story, which lasts as long as it should last”. As a result, this is a very special debut, so much so that they had “almost no expectations with the launch”, although so far their most dire expectations have been exceeded. “It’s not going to get us out of poverty, but at least for a few months we pay the rent,” frankly admits the developer, aware that selling video games at such a low price is not profitable, especially for a studio that has just started to professionalize.
But Happy Break Bones is a young team – Carlos Royuela Torres is only 25, even though he’s been developing video games himself for ten years – and they want to do things differently. This can be seen in the fact that his cover letter is a short, cheap video game about an LGBTIQA+ romance set during the Spanish Civil War, but also in the fact that there is no boss as such, but all decisions are made by consensus. While its first was “a very hopeful but clearly dark, gloomy and contemplative story, the next title will be the opposite: very bright, dynamic and energetic.” The goal is not to burn out during the development process, and to make your studio’s work “sustainable over a long period of time.”
About The Author
