Gran Canaria’s Broken Bird Games Breaks Out With Psychological Horror Video Game ‘Luto’

With “Luto,” Gran Canaria’s Broken Bird Games has pulled off a rare feat for an indie, punching above its weight in an oversupplied global games market. 

Visually rich and narratively ambitious, the game mixes psychological horror with reflections on grief, anxiety, and depression. 

“‘Luto’ was born out of personal experiences with the loss of loved ones, which I find deeply terrifying in itself,” Borja Corvo Santana co-founder at Broken Bird told Variety. “It felt like the right genre to explore themes like anxiety and depression and to give form to emotions we had lived through.”

The result is a game where you explore and are narrated over in the vein of “The Stanley Parable”: How reliable and who the narrator is becomes an ever more prescient question. While inspired by games such as “What Remains of Edith Finch” and the legendary, ill-fated “P.T. (Silent Hill),” the world builders looked to the Canary Islands itself, specifically artist Néstor’s painting series Poema del Atlántico. “His work portrays the passage of the day through different kinds of light, and we tried to recreate that feeling inside “Luto.” Pintaderas, the geometric motifs of the Canaries’ indigenous culture, and other local references also inform the game’s world.

Broken Bird opted for deliberate spatial incoherence to match the theme. “We wanted the environment to feel both homely and alive, yet also confusing and oppressive,” he said. “At times the environment was meant to give players a sense of calm, while at others it was meant to frustrate or even bore them, all in service of the narrative.”

The approach resonated with would-be fans early with the 2023 demo becoming a turning point. “The reception to the demo made us reconsider. We decided to take the opportunity and aim higher, making something more complex in both gameplay and narrative.”

Backing came from Selecta Play, which handled funding, localization, and QA, and Astrolabe Games, which has opened up Asian markets, providing the game international reach on launch.

For the Canaries, Luto’s breakout signals that the region’s video game sector could follow the trajectory of its live action service production and animation. Both industries have grown rapidly over the last decade, leveraging competitive incentives and high quality work to attract international productions and establish quality local players. 

Inevitably, their journey to getting it made has found gaps. “Most indie studios begin as a few friends or even one person making a game out of passion, and it is almost impossible to manage that within a formal business context,” he noted noted. Tax advantages exist, but indie outfits often only benefit once they are incorporated and formally capitalized something many can only achieve after their first commercial release. “More early-stage support would make a big difference.”

For now, the studio intends to remain small and narrative-focused, preferably within horror but not necessarily limited to it. “What resonates most are the projects that do not follow the molds of what is considered ‘popular’ and that instead take risks with original ideas or bring something new to an existing genre,” he said.