The first thing that happened to me in the demo for The Little Tomb: The Maholova Club And The Search For A Dead Body was a stuffed horse on a spring telling me it knew when and how I’d die. Many such horses. You play as Kofun, a boy shaped like a keyhole tomb who is also sort of an actual keyhole tomb but also a boy who wants to fulfill his destiny as a keyhole tomb, namely by finding a dead body to bury inside of himself. He lives in a park with his mate Haniwa, who is a Haniwa. Haniwa’s secret is that he’s very good at calligraphy. Here’s some visual orientation in case you’re not caught up yet.

It’s from Cavyhouse, whose previous offering was “dungeon agriculturalization roguelite game” The Sealed Ampoule. The demo itself is a little too short to get a good feel for things, but if it’s at all representative, the game is primarily about hanging out with good weirdos and poking objects.

You hang about in the park Kofun and Hanawa live in. You slide down a slide. Swing on a swing. Swing on a bar, an annoying object for its refusal to bend to the verb-noun symmetry found elsewhere. You collect points for doing all this, then spend them on pondering various objects. I very much enjoy the idea of a pondering currency, both conceptually and in practise. It’s all suitably whimsical but then Kofun will occasionally gesture at the fact that he is, undoubtedly, a tomb. I am nothing if not curious to see where this all goes. Cheers to The Attribune for the spot.