Funeral for the Sun springs to life on Windows and Mac

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Demo also available for deduction mystery rooted in Latin American history and magical realism 

Most deduction mysteries have you solve the case of one victim or another, murdered or missing, but in Funeral for the Sun, the newly released game by Puerto Rican developer Nicolás Cid Delgado, it'll be up to players to determine the fate of an entire town's populace who disappeared without a trace. 

In 1968, all but a single survivor from the 724 residents of Cerro Milagroso vanished suddenly. The "official report claimed a fire consumed nearly everything," but fledgling journalist Naylor Rivera believes something "far stranger" was behind the incident. Decades after the fact, Naylor decides to visit what remains of the remote town in person, and as you "search the ashes of [the] abandoned Latin American town," you'll begin to uncover "400 years of secrets." As you explore, you'll encounter more than seventy "memories" that still linger in Cerro Milagroso, each one a "small part of a much larger tapestry." Through them you will "witness the past with your own eyes," but it will be up to you to correctly identify those involved and "construct a web of connections between townsfolk" in order to "untangle the history of a community cursed by generations of supernatural forces."

Inspired by games like Return of the Obra Dinn but rooted in "Latin American history and magical realism," Funeral for the Sun is presented in a lovely watercolour paint style that looks like a traditional third-person adventure but plays out in point-and-click slideshow-style fashion. You won't move Naylor around other than to exit to adjoining screens. Instead you'll interact with sparkling hotspots to learn more about Cerro Milagroso, some of which will transport you back in time directly to see frozen tableaus from the past. The characters are not voiced, but their conversations are recorded in text, granting you insight into their lives in their own words. Careful observation is crucial, as here "every clue hides a contradiction and every memory is suspect."

Answers won't simply be handed to you, however. In this non-linear "magical realist detective mystery about memory, rebellion, and the stories we bury," you'll need to formulate deductions in your journal by collecting more than a hundred profile photos, assigning full names to each participant, and then cross-referencing what you've discovered and drawing connections between them. The appearance of certain characters may even change at different times of their lives, requiring you to "combine portraits together when they represent the same person." But identifying who is just the first step towards ultimately piecing together "timelines and hidden relationships" that will let you fully "reconstruct what really happened" so many years ago. 

The secrets of Funeral for the Sun are ready to be completely revealed, as the game has now been released on Steam. Or you can tread lightly into history through the playable demo that is also available for download on Windows and Mac.

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