Bury me, my Love is, as we like to call it, a « reality-inspired game ». It isn’t a documentary, nor is it biographical. Nour and Majd are fictional characters that don’t actually exist. But they are directly inspired by lots of real migrants whose experiences were similar to what happens in the game - roughly 90% of what may happen to Nour in-game is directly inspired by true anecdotes.
One of our main writing guide and help was Dana. This young Syrian woman now lives in Germany, and when we contacted her to tell her about our game project, she agreed to be our editorial advisor. Her life experience, her advice and her script corrections have been super precious to us. They helped us reach our goal to write a story that would be as believable and true to reality as possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYaNM1QSFRM
But Bury me, my Love isn’t just about Dana’s experience. Before we started writing the game’s story, we spend more than 3 months gathering documentation. We read news articles and interviews from a wide variety of sources, watched documentaries, consulted NGO reports... We wanted to have a very thorough view of the situation, and understand the realities and struggles migrants face during their journey.
The important thing is we did not approach the topic as activists, with an agenda or a point of view that we wanted to force on players. Our endeavour was closer to those of journalists or documentary filmmakers (we have two former journalists in the team). We were touched and moved by real-life stories that are often not told in mainstream medias, and we wanted to help more people be aware of them. And we thought that the best way to convey those very diverse stories, and to render the unpredictable nature of a migrant’s odyssey, was through a video game.
That’s how the concept for Bury me, my Love was born.