‘Wire Wood Daughters’ Feels Like a Haunted Game Boy Cartridge

Wire Wood Daughters feels at all times as if it may break, but not in a Bethesda sort of way. This world is fragile, barely hanging on but doing so tenaciously and from a place of desperate necessity. It is both vulnerable and harsh; terrifying in the same way that truly needing someone is. Wire Wood Daughters is like stepping into a history of therapy sessions, flashed to a burnt Game Boy cartridge and forgotten about for 20 years.

This all sounds absurdly hyperbolic, I know, but Wire Wood Daughters functions so well on so many different layers that its effectiveness is best digested on a larger, more abstract scale. If I just told you that Wire Wood Daughters is a top-down, retro-inspired narrative exploration game, I’d be doing you a severe disservice.

The game was single-handedly developed and scored by Rook, and its sound design is perhaps its strongest character. Shades of Akira Yamaoka’s more subtle works are carefully nuanced and allowed to influence each scene, without disrupting Wire Wood Daughters‘ delicate aural/visual cohesion. Likewise, the game’s narration is deftly performed and is processed just enough to make its own contribution to the palpable, sensory wound that is Wire Wood Daughters.

Playing the game contributes its own irreplaceable piece of the puzzle, with the player alone and lost in a world that repeats, changes and shepherds, but never leads by the hand. There’s a sense of broken affection coming from the environment; that it wants you to escape its inscrutable purgatory, but doesn’t have enough left of itself to do more than it does. The player is propelled by the same sort of inborn, anxious compulsion that feeds so many of the self-destructive behaviors that prevent people from letting go.

Wire Wood Daughters only took about 40 minutes to play through, but I’ll be thinking about it for days. Wear headphones.

You can download the game for free, or pay what you like, on itch.io.