A Butterfly
Release date: Jan 23, 2025
Developers: alienmelon
Publishers: alienmelon
Genres: Adventure, Indie
Categories: Single-player, Family Sharing
Supported languages: English

'These ruins of a lighthouse have brittle bones. Ocean once surrounded it. You know the stories... Of a great beautiful oasis where titans came to die. Grief brought you here. Now you are trapped in an endless cycle, on a world that is lost to you.' Part horror, part interactive poem about overcoming and bittersweet surrender, A Butterfly is an arthouse game open world flight-sim meets walking-sim with interactive fiction elements. You must explore a world that is alien to you. Transcendence comes at a heavy price. Surrounded by a never ending desert where you learn an ancient story. The abyss called your name. You followed it here. Now you are its prisoner. 

Press reviews: “A Butterfly è una breve poesia interattiva costruita alternando sezioni ambientate in un surreale mondo 3D, un deserto cosparso di scheletri giganti esplorabile volando, a vignette interattive realizzate nel tipico stile di Lawhead.” Artribune “It’s a beautiful if haunting poem about mourning told through the visual, interactive medium of games, where you — a butterfly — fly through a graveyard of enormous giants stretching their hands out into the sky, interspersed with retro Windows XP-style pop-ups.” The Gamer “When I played the game A Butterfly, by alienmelon, I found myself ruminating a lot on that limbo between the problem and the result. The time in which you feel stuck, paralyzed, even frozen in time, unable to do anything more than suffer whatever irks you right now.” The Geekiary 

Notes: A Butterfly contains non-graphical descriptions of body horror, and features some depictions of blood, skeletons, and existential dread.