Bury Me, My Love

The phrase “Bury me, my love” apparently is a Syrian goodbye that roughly means, “Take care, don’t even think about dying before I do.”

"Bury Me, My Love" is a story experience told via a phone messaging app. Syrian refugee Nour makes the arduous journey throughout Europe, whilst her husband Majd stays behind to take care of his family. Nour's aim is to get to Germany to claim asylum, but your plans can change based on your experience, or you are prevented from travelling further by law enforcement/lack of funds.

Much of the dialogue is pre-set - so you just read, but occasionally you must choose a response for Majd, which can alter Nour's journey if she listens to your advice. There's no real right choice - or it's not obvious what the consequences will be. You can play the game multiple times to experience the different paths. There are 50 different locations and 19 potential different endings.

Nour is one of those people that send many messages per paragraph and there's a slight pause between each message. Majd's text can be sped up slightly by clicking. Occasionally you are sent pictures which then changes the background in the game. Sometimes you have to send pictures (you just click the photo icon then click again to take a selfie of Majd).

The game was inspired by a Le Monde article about a Syrian refugee, and the developer did some research to try and make the game as realistic as possible. In my journeys, Nour did get stopped by police on a few occasions and spent time in camps, but there were some parts where her journey across borders sounded a little too easy to me, and she had little trouble recharging her phone. I don't actually know how realistic her journey is though.

One feature that would have been nice - is to see the local time for Nour. Since you are looking at Majd's phone, the time displayed would be his local time. I wasn't convinced some of the conversations were that accurate when Majd stated it was getting late, but Nour would be a few hours behind.

It's quite a slow and dull experience that I could only play in short bursts. It's a fairly short game, although my Steam time showed 3.4 hours for my first playthrough which is quite a bit longer than others seemed to claim (2-2.5 hours). I think some time was lost due to me not knowing at what point it actually saved so I had to see some conversations again when I next played (I would have thought that was less than 20 mins collectively though). When I replayed, it seemed to take just over 2 hours, but my journey was cut short by only going as far as Bulgaria. In my first run, I made it to Calais in the North of France.

Given the length of each play, I think most people won't have the motivation to play this more than twice. You will end up seeing the same dialogue if you reach a common city and there doesn't seem to be a way to speed through the text.