Lofsöng hides a nuclear warning

There is a spiral cut into the stone floor like a record groove, and a small figure in bulky headgear standing beside it, listening. Lofsöng, the first game from Unrelated Studio in Turin, directed by Alessandro Durando, is an exploration adventure with no dialogue, no map and no text you can read on arrival: an invented language, buried in monuments, that the game teaches you to hear. It premiered in the Tribeca Games program in June, showed a new trailer called "Bergmál" at gamescom Opening Night Live, and is wishlistable on Steam now, release date to be announced.

The setting is Earth, long dead: an Exclusion Zone of dust and ash in a permanent nuclear winter, which you cross with a shapeshifting origami companion that folds into a kite, a glider, a sailboat. "Every monument in LOFSÖNG was built to be read," the studio writes, and that is the k design: geometry and sound doing the work of words, sculptures you play like instruments until the stone gives up what it remembers.

Many years ago, I remember someone from the Longnow Foundation telling me about the problem of marking nuclear waste sites for an unknown future audience. It's a problem that has haunted engineers since the Sandia reports on marking waste sites for a 10,000-year audience, the ones that produced the line "this place is a message." Their answer was hostile earthworks and granite warnings; Durando's answer is a game where the warning system is the world, and reading it is the verb.

The title leans Icelandic too: lofsöngur is a hymn (and their national anthem), bergmál an echo. Killscreen has been listening to concrete for a decade, from the artist who gave brutalist architecture a singing voice in 2016 to VHOLUME this month. Lofsöng is the first one that asks the concrete to sing back.