Bury Me, My Love

Bury me, my Love is a text-messaging interactive fiction made by The Pixel Hunt with Figs and ARTE France, released on mobile in October 2017 and later ported to Windows and Nintendo Switch in January 2019. It is cheap — around five euros at full price, and the Steam listing is frequently discounted by 75 per cent or more. The store listings are live and the game still runs. The interface is available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and, Japanese. Strangely there is no Arabic version. A single playthrough takes upwards of two hours in fast-track mode; played in real time, where Nour's messages arrive when she sends them, one story stretches across roughly two weeks. The real-time design is one of the game's most important features.

What is it for?

Awareness for the general public, not professional training. The studio calls it a reality-inspired game. It draws on a December 2015 Le Monde piece by Lucie Soullier about Dana, a young Syrian woman who fled to Germany, and both Soullier and the woman whose journey it follows consulted on the script. The makers state no formal learning outcomes and supply no facilitator guide or debrief material. It does not set out to teach asylum law, registration procedures or how an aid organisation works. It won prizes at the International Mobile Gaming Awards, the Emotional Games Awards and Japan Prize 2018.

The academic literature supports the game's value as a representation of forced migration, rather than as a tested educational intervention. A 2022 Game Studies article argues that its real-time messaging mechanic communicates the temporal uncertainty and disruption of refugee experience. A 2024 article in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies places it among a small group of games that use interactive narrative to put players into moral dilemmas around migration, while also warning that such games can struggle to connect an individual migrant's experience with the larger political and structural conditions shaping migration. A 2023 scoping review similarly identifies Bury Me, My Love as a game that can introduce players to sudden migration, ethical dilemmas and the political conditions surrounding refugees.

How do you play it?

You chat with your wife on your phone. You read what Nour sends, you pick one of a few replies, and it is gone — no undo, no score, no map, just a phone and whatever you happen to know.

Then you wait. The condensed version becomes tiring, so play it in real time if you can, which in practice means on a phone. It works surprisingly well: a message arrives while you are on the bus home, and learning about Nour's fate does seem real. Academic analysis of the game makes the same design point from a different angle: the waiting is not just part of the story, it is part of what the game is trying to communicate about forced migration. Save the fast-track mode for a session that has to fit inside a room and a timeslot.

The nineteen endings only open up on replay, choosing differently each time. Keeping track is hard, and doing it repeatedly is both time consuming and emotionally heavy.

Is it any good?

Yes, within its aim, and two things in it work unusually well for a humanitarian reader.

The first is that information has a shelf life. Advice that arrives late or vague changes where Nour goes. In real time this is visceral: you type something, she does not reply for hours, and you sit with it. A peer-reviewed analysis in Game Studies by Elizabeth Nijdam examines this use of elapsed time as the game's central device, arguing it puts the player inside the waiting rather than describing it to them.

The second is that you never control her. You practise supporting someone else's decision about her own life instead of making it for her — a discipline the sector talks about constantly and almost never gets to rehearse. Most games about crises hand the player a lever. This one hands them an opinion. A 2026 peer-reviewed study makes a related point from the perspective of transnational care: the messaging interface makes visible emotional labour, temporal uncertainty and the limited agency of people trying to support someone at a distance.

The limits are real. We could not find a study measuring whether players actually learned or retained specific knowledge from the game, so its educational impact remains unproven. The academic literature is much stronger on representation, temporality, ethics and the emotional experience of migration than on learning outcomes. Humanitarian actors barely appear: this is the experience of displacement, not the work of responding to it, and a reader looking for how a response functions will not find it here.

The absence of Arabic is worth naming plainly — a game about a Syrian woman, built with input from the woman whose journey inspired it, that is still not available in Arabic on the current major store listings. At the same time, that should not obscure what the research says about the game's representational care: the woman whose journey inspired it was involved in the writing and checked the game's details, which is an unusually direct form of consultation for a game of this kind.

Who is it for?

Use it for awareness sessions, induction, and protection or migration teams, with your own debrief and with several players comparing different endings.

What it offers is not the refugee's experience — you stay safe the whole time — but something practitioners rarely get: caring about one specific person in danger and being unable to reach her. Most of us meet displacement as caseloads and figures. Few have sat with a phone waiting to hear whether someone we love is alive, though colleagues from affected communities often have. That closeness is what makes the moments land where no organisation was anywhere near her.