Laura
June 2021
A game about a little girl looking for her dad who was taken to a concentration camp on Terceira Island in the Azores, during WWI. Laura is a single-player top-down, stealth single-player 3D about WWI in the Azores. It’s a game also to discover the landscape and beauty of the Azores, while interacting with the environment: play with animals and search for plants. The game won Best Children’s Game Award for PlayStation® Talents Portugal 2021.
A game about a little girl looking for her dad who was taken to a concentration camp on Terceira Island in the Azores, during WWI. Laura is a single-player top-down, stealth single-player 3D about WWI in the Azores. It’s a game also to discover the landscape and beauty of the Azores, while interacting with the environment: play with animals and search for plants. The game won Best Children’s Game Award for PlayStation® Talents Portugal 2021.
Portuguese/English
Windows
polyweld.itch.io/laura
Windows
polyweld.itch.io/laura
Laura is set in Monte Brasil where we pass through familiar places in the area: the landscape and fauna of Monte Brasil, the Ermida de Santo António, and the Fortress of São João Batista, the site of the prisoner depot. The game deconstructs the romantic side sometimes presented in war stories. Thus, it focuses on raising awareness that war is something negative, whatever side you are on. There are moments that contrast with the scenario that one was living. Laura has with her a herbarium written by her father to collect plants from the Azores, building a dialogue.
Throughout the first part, the player's main objective becomes clear: the girl must find her father. However, in order to evolve throughout the game, the player will have to acquire knowledge and objects to pass to the next phase. In the beginning, the goal is for the player to leave the house without being caught by Laura's mother, carrying a book/herbarium.
Next, Laura begins to follow a trail and starts looking for the plants that are missing from the herbarium that her father gave her when they arrived in Azores. The herbarium acts as a retention loop, adding also an emotional dialogue between father and daughter to the narrative.