The Language of Bones
Iluvenen was once a dark and nameless wilderness ruled by monsters. Then the noble heroes of the West came in their chariots, slew the monsters, and raised from the wilderness a great nation.
This is the story told in Iluvenen. The monster-kin, descended from the children of heroes of the West and the monsters, are an inconvenient reminder of what that story fails to explain.
The scholars of Iluvenen sought to learn the secrets of the monsters buried beneath their bright and shining towers. The monster-kin tried to tell them, until finally they learned: the language of bones is dance.
The Language of Bones is a game played in pairs. One person plays a monster-kin raising a monster from their grave with the power of dance, and the other plays their long-dead ancestor. Throughout gameplay, the monster-kin are able to speak, but the monsters cannot, because the language of bones is dance. This is a game about genocide, legacy, erasure, reclamation, and the complex fractures between ancestors and descendants.
Play this game if you:
- Want to express a story and character with few or no words
- Have an interest in stories about colonialism, legacy, intergenerational trauma, and identity
