The Tales of Bayun

I keep thinking about a specific moment near the end of the first story in The Tales of Bayun: a choice so genuinely uncomfortable that I sat with the cursor hovering for a full minute. That's the whole game in one image. FlyinDogs, a debut studio out of Georgia, built something modest in scope and quietly devastating in effect - a point-and-click narrative adventure set in Storona, a flat, myth-soaked world balanced on the backs of three demon bears, where nothing is clean, nobody is purely good, and Bayun the Cat - a trickster figure from actual Slavic folklore - may or may not eat you depending on your answers. The structure is episodic, and what launched are two interconnected stories following different characters. The first leans on a trait accumulation system: choices you make early assign character traits, and those traits later gate certain dialogue options and branching paths. It's a light but genuinely interesting RPG layer - the kind that rewards a second playthrough just to see what you locked yourself out of. The second story swaps that out for a companion-survival mechanic where keeping a young boy alive shapes your options. Neither system is deep by genre standards, but both give the narrative some mechanical texture beyond raw dialogue trees. Point-and-click exploration sits underneath everything - you poke at still, hand-drawn scenes searching for hidden objects, items for your inventory, and the occasional path that only opens if you already know what you're looking for. The art direction is where the craft becomes undeniable. Every location is a painted panel - dark, earthy tones, the kind of color palette that feels like wet soil and woodsmoke. Reviewers who compared the tone to The Witcher universe are not wrong, but Storona feels rougher and more folkloric than the Continent, less heroic fantasy and more village-level dread. The soundtrack carries that atmosphere further still; it has a quality somewhere between liturgical chant and field recording, quiet enough to make silence feel weighted. Community players specifically praised the music and the art style as carrying the experience when the writing occasionally stumbles in translation. And it does stumble. Some reviewers noted narrative inconsistencies and localization roughness - this is, after all, a small debut team. The playtime is honest: a relaxed run through both stories clocks around three to four hours. The episodic design meant more content was contingent on commercial success, and that success was modest at best, so the planned expansion beyond these two episodes appears to have stalled. That's the real caveat here. What exists is complete in its own way - each story reaches its ending - but players hoping for a continuing series should know the road likely ends here. For fans of Slavic mythology, dark folk narrative, or point-and-click adventures that trust the player to sit with moral ambiguity, The Tales of Bayun is the kind of handcrafted underdog I want more people to find. It knows exactly what it is, it ends when it should, and the image of that giant, dangerous, morally dubious cat will stay with you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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