I do love a game that tells you upfront what it’s about while making nary a lick of sense, and visual novel Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful is certainly that. You are, indeed, being buried alive. The person burying you is your girlfriend, who waves aside your protests that you aren’t dead yet, pointing out that this is exactly what a dead person would say if they were trying to avoid being buried. Can’t fault the logic.
Click the downward arrow below the animated image of your girlfriend burying you alive and you’ll discover a murky fungal blackscreen where cartoon rats periodically try to eat you, unless you click to get rid of them. Below that, there’s a kind of Alice in Wonderland-style alcove in which a tousled lady with a rat on her shoulder reassures you that being buried alive ain’t so bad. As she points out, “underground is like, the only place to escape capitalism, plus it’s nice and cool”. Again, I can’t fault the logic. Then she offers to play cards with you. The cards in question have rats doodled on them, including a wonderfully festive rodent Joker. There is passing mention of a “rat god”.
After playing a round with the underground card-playing rat lady I tunnelled back up to the gravemouth to tell my girlfriend about the underground card-playing rat lady and she said surrrrre, an underground card-playing rat lady, that’s clearly a real thing. I then clicked back to the intervening ratscreen to stop some pesky squeakers eating my tender bits, and accidentally clicked on the option to “succumb to the dirt”. Game over.
I started a new game and managed to “drown in the dirt” within a couple of dialogue exchanges. That was fun. I sense that there’s an element of personal memoir at play here. I think you should play too. It’s free, you know.
The creators are Allie Vera, Destini Islands, robobarbie and Angela He. I do hereby pronounce them a Cool Bunch.
Startlingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve written about being buried alive, though the other one has VR in it.
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
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