Essays on Empathy

I want you to think about the last time a game made you feel like you were reading someone's diary and their sketchbook at the same time. That is roughly what sitting with Essays on Empathy feels like, and it snuck up on me completely. This is a compiled anthology from Deconstructeam, the three-person Valencia studio behind The Red Strings Club and The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. The ten short interactive stories here span roughly six years of the studio's development history, most of them originally built for Ludum Dare game jams. Each individual piece runs somewhere between ten minutes and an hour, so the whole collection clears in roughly a sitting or two. What keeps it from feeling slight is the curatorial layer sitting underneath every game: concept art, production sketches, and a mini-documentary for each title, where the team gives a candid post-mortem on why they made it and what went wrong. That context transforms the package from a simple anthology into something closer to an artist's portfolio with the notebooks still attached. The range of mechanics is genuinely surprising. Underground Hangovers is a miniature Metroidvania about stranded miners navigating caves with improvised tools. Supercontinent Ltd is a social-engineering puzzle where you fake identities and extract information over phone calls. Eternal Home Floristry drops you into a quiet magic-realist narrative built around a flower-arranging mechanic. De Tres al Cuarto, the one brand-new title made for this compilation, uses a deckbuilding system with four card types to construct comedy routines for a stand-up act, which sounds absurd and mostly works, even if its opening stretch drags. The breadth is real. None of these outstay their welcome, and that discipline is its own kind of craft. The soundtrack situation is worth singling out: every game carries its own distinct score, all of them accessible from a dedicated folder right in the main menu, and the music is consistently the emotional ceiling of each piece. The rough edges are also real and worth naming upfront. These games were preserved largely in their jam-released state, which means no save systems, no pause menus in several titles, and occasional bugs, including at least one in Behind Every Great One that can cut a playthrough short. Controls lean on basic keyboard inputs and point-and-click, and a few of the experiences are thin enough that they feel more like proofs-of-concept than finished works. Because the team is Spanish-speaking, a handful of English translations carry minor awkwardness. None of these are dealbreakers, but if you need polish and friction-free UX, the rawness here will grate on you. Who is this actually for? Fans of Deconstructeam's longer games who want to understand the studio's DNA. People who play through short narrative games for craft reasons, the same way some readers seek out short story collections specifically. Aspiring developers who want to watch a small studio think out loud about their own work. Anyone who has ever wondered what a game jam prototype looks like when someone actually respects it enough to publish it properly. If you bounced off The Red Strings Club because the bartending mechanic felt thin, a few pieces here will confirm that instinct. If you loved it, you will find two games in this collection that share characters and design ideas with that world, and that alone is worth the admission.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Essays on Empathy.