The Lion’s Song Review: Mi’pu’mi Games’ Four Artists, One Storm

The Lion’s Song opens on Wilma Dörfl in a cabin in the Alps, stuck. Her mentor Arthur Caban, a wealthy university professor, brought her to Vienna and told her she would matter to the future of modern music. Now she cannot finish the piece that is supposed to prove it. Mi’pu’mi Games built an entire game out of that silence, and it holds up.

Trailer, via IGDBcom.

Four Episodes, Four Artists

The Lion’s Song is an episodic point-and-click adventure from the Austrian studio Mi’pu’mi Games, released in four parts. The first arrived in July 2016, the complete season in July 2017, and a Nintendo Switch version in July 2018. It runs on Linux, PC, Mac and Switch, and it is single player.

Each episode follows a different artist or thinker in early 20th century Austria. The first, Silence, is Wilma’s. The second, Anthology, follows the painter Franz Markert through Vienna. The third, Derivation, centres on the mathematician Emma Recniczek. The fourth, Closure, takes place largely aboard a train and ties the earlier characters together as the First World War approaches.

You do not collect an inventory or grind through traditional adventure puzzles. You examine locations, pick objects, and choose what to say. That is the whole verb set, and it is enough.

Wilma Dörfl and the Storm

Caban sends Wilma to a solitary alpine cabin to recover her inspiration. She is fighting writer’s block on a career-defining composition. High mountains, stormy weather, no company.

What she finds is sound. During the storm she begins drawing musical ideas from the noises around her, and her conversations and anxieties shape the work she eventually names “The Lion’s Song.” The episode’s central question is whether she can finish it. In her creative crisis she has an unexpected encounter, and the game leaves the rest to her and to you.

Franz Markert Sees in Layers

Anthology moves to Vienna and to Franz Markert, who perceives aspects of other people’s personalities as visual layers. He tries to capture those layers in his portraits. Along the way he meets Gustav Klimt and Sigmund Freud, and he struggles to understand himself while painting everyone else.

It is a stranger premise than Wilma’s and a warmer one. A painter who can see the strata of a person and still cannot read his own is the kind of idea most games would flatten into a gimmick. This one does not.

Emma Recniczek Becomes Emil Schell

Derivation is the sharpest of the four. Emma Recniczek is a mathematician whose opportunities are restricted because she is a woman. To get into a circle of established mathematicians, she assumes a male identity: Emil Schell.

The episode is about access, and about what the disguise costs the person wearing it. It is the point where The Lion’s Song stops being a game about creative block and starts being a game about who is allowed to work.

Choices That Carry Across Episodes

Decisions in one story can change details in others. Recurring people, locations and events link the otherwise self-contained episodes, and the choices you make in Silence have a direct impact on the storylines of all four, ultimately determining whether the protagonists find the success they are working for.

After each episode the game shows how your major decisions compare with other players’. You can revisit a choice without restarting the whole game, and a Connections Gallery records the links you have discovered.

A Game Jam That Grew Up

The Lion’s Song started as a personal game jam project. Austrian designer Stefan Srb developed the original story for Ludum Dare in 2014. The prototype drew a positive response, and Srb’s employer Mi’pu’mi expanded it into a commercial production with around ten developers.

That origin shows in the best way. The episodes are short and self-contained because they were conceived as small, complete things, not as chapters of a padded campaign.

Where It Slips

Interactivity is thin. Examining and choosing is the whole of it, and some players will want more to do with their hands. The final episode, Closure, drew a more mixed response than the first three, and the reason is not hard to see: it has to connect four lives and place them against the approaching war, which is a lot of freight for one train ride.

The first three episodes earn their endings. The fourth earns its thesis.

What Mi’pu’mi Got Right

The Lion’s Song treats the creative process as a subject rather than a backdrop. Wilma’s block, Franz’s layers, Emma’s borrowed name — these are not puzzles to solve but conditions to sit inside, and the sepia-toned pixel art and the music carry them without straining.

The comparison against other narrative adventures of its era is not close on writing. What holds it back is scope: four short stories, limited verbs, and a finale that has to do structural work the earlier episodes never asked of themselves. That is a real cost, and it is why this is not a perfect score.

What stays is the specific thing Mi’pu’mi understood. A composer in a storm, listening to the weather for a melody, is a better game premise than most studios manage in a decade. The Lion’s Song won Best Indie Game at the 2016 Deutscher Entwicklerpreis and took an honorable mention for Excellence in Narrative at the 2017 Independent Games Festival. Both were deserved.

indie game review · Mi'pu'mi Games · narrative adventure · point-and-click · story-driven games · The Lion's Song