Lucy recommends: Funeral for the Sun

But let's move on to this week's pick, and my overall pick of Next Fest: Funeral for the Sun, a hand-drawn deduction game by a solo dev in the same vein as Return of the Obra Dinn and The Roottrees are Dead. Let's get into it!

🎁 Before we jump in!

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Why Funeral for the Sun rules

Huge thanks to Nicolás for hopping on a call with me to talk about the game!

Inspirations: Nicolás was inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn, not only because it was a solo dev project, but because he admired the way that the game told its stories in a way that fits its time traveling and deduction based mechanics. "It doesn't even have much dialogue, but you get a real strong sense of the story purely because players are forced to engage with it in order to solve the game," Nicolás says. "I think there's a lot of games that are very much like, here's a story and then here's gameplay and they don't really mesh well. I think I wanted them to mesh well because I guess part of me just wants people to read the things that I have written, you know?" For the game's story, Nicolás took inspiration from Latin American fiction, (particularly the book 100 Years of Solitude) calling out the recurring themes of collective memory, the censorship of history and the people who fight it, and complicated families as things that stuck with him and that he wanted to explore. The writing is wonderful; offering snapshots at key moments and insights into characters that gradually click into place over time. The opening of the game is covered in the demo, and it focuses on the Solanor family. You poke around inside their house, slowly uncovering why the brothers are fighting, why the father is so despondent, and ultimately, some of their fates. It's a great start to the game, and by focusing on a singular family, provides a great launching pad to uncovering the rest of the town's secrets. There are supernatural elements too that I won't spoil here. I've played past the demo and can assure you: they're worth sticking around for.

Sound and vision: The first thing that struck me about Funeral for the Sun was its art style: the bold, flame-laden key art immediately catching my eye as I scrolled listlessly through endless entries for next year's IGF Awards. The entire game is hand drawn by Nicolás; it's sketchy, scratchy, and wonderfully human. In a game where you're working to deduce people's names and familial relationships, every detail counts, and they're gorgeous. I love that Funeral for the Sun is so colorful: a warm, rich palette of orange and red hues adorn its abandoned streets, and Nicolás also niftily uses color in gameplay, telling me, "Each of those memories in this kind of Obra Dinn memory world can be a different color depending on the era so I wanted something somewhat monochromatic so that it felt like when you were entering into a different era, you already immediately knew which era you were in." I'm always a huge proponent of striking art styles, and this one is stunning.

Adventure zone: One thing I was pleasantly surprised by were the light adventure game mechanics. Some rooms will be inaccessible until you find the right key, or some vines will block a path, requiring you to find a tool to chop them down. According to Nicolás, the game originally started life as more of an adventure game, but noticed that playtesters would simply find the items and progress, later finding themselves lost and confused after doing so. It's why he added a checklist to help gate progression along with finding the items, which really works. Knowing that there's a set number of connections to find or characters to name is comforting as a player, and in a game where every piece of dialog matters, gating in this way stops my brain from running a mile a minute and getting too ahead of myself. It's an elegant way to keep the player exactly where they need to be.

Connections: I'm a big fan of Obra Dinn and Roottrees, and I really enjoy that Nicolás has added combining portraits and establishing connections beyond their relationship status. Figuring out who people's parents are, as well as who killed who, is a delicious spin on deduction-based games, and makes me feel like I'm uncovering some really juicy secrets (and boy, do you). It's the mark of a great deduction game that seeing the pop up to lock in names or connections (it appears when you get three of either correct) is a fist-pumping moment each time. I've spoken before about how much I enjoy the writing, but it's also thanks to the quality of life features that mean I don't feel down if I get something wrong. I'm able to jot down my own notes and add entire memories (that, more often than not, will feature descriptions of key dates and events) to my notebook, so I don't have to keep backtracking. Upon revisiting scenes, conversations are entirely laid out, so you can scroll to the exact line you were looking for. As someone who checks their work often, I really appreciate the thoughtful design.

Hopes and dreams: Nicolás hopes that Funeral for the Sun finds its audience of course, but he also hopes that it shines a light on game development in Puerto Rico and encourages others to make their own games. He was able to attend GDC this year thanks to the Puerto Rican Game Developers Association, and would love for the local community to continue growing.

Final thoughts: I became immediately enamored with Funeral for the Sun. As a fan of deduction games, it ticked every box: thoughtful design, satisfying puzzle solving, and excellent writing, and it's so impressive that it's made by one solo developer. The worldbuilding is deftly layered, and I can't wait to see it through to its end.

Thanks so much for reading! I'll be back on Monday with Peek at the Week. I'll leave you with this absolutely wonderful review of Dressmaker from its Steam page that honestly made me tear up a little bit. Despite studio closures and AI slop and project cancelations, we've got to remember just why games matter, and I think this review does a wonderful job of that. Have a great weekend.