In my ongoing journey to play games from as many countries as possible, I ran across this early example of a game from Hungary. It was developed by Pál Balog with music by Zoltán Mericske, and was brought to English-speaking audiences by the British company Andromeda Software, who specialized in producing English localizations of games made in the Eastern Bloc. (They were the ones who introduced Tetris to the West.)



Bird Mother (or Madár mama in Hungarian) is, as you might have guessed, a game where you play as a mother bird who must build a nest, feed her babies, and protect the young while they fledge. (It's also an early example of a game with a female protagonist!) You might also guess from the release date and the English subtitle "Life's a Struggle" that the game is hard, and you'd be correct in that as well. I was actually impressed by how uncomfortably infuriating the game is to play.

( more about the game and a little info on personal computers in Communist Europe )

You can play Bird Mother in your browser if you wish to be reminded that whether you build your nest in the First World or the Second, life truly is a struggle.

A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime to the voices of TV celebrities advertising new products over the in-store cable network, to the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the bar code scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.

Keiko has worked at the same convenience store her entire adult life. Outside the shop she's bewildered by unspoken social rules, but inside it, there's an explicit protocol for everything—how to stand, how to smile, how to say good morning. In this well-defined and orderly world, she is happy and fulfilled. The only problem is that as she ages into her thirties, her family increasingly pressures her to abandon that world and pursue marriage and children instead. But if all they want is for her to have a man in her life, maybe all she has to do is grab the nearest unattached man and fake it for their benefit?

I'm trying to think of the best way to describe this book. It's devastating and hopeful, hilarious and dark as fuck. The summary makes it sound like a fake-dating romp, and it does have elements of that... except the guy Keiko fake-dates is a disturbed misogynist who thinks the world is against him (we'd call him an incel, though I don't know if that maps exactly onto Japanese categories of disaffected men) and when Keiko takes him in she considers that she'll probably have to feed him at least once a day and wonders if it'll be a problem that she's never had a pet before.

Keiko is obviously autistic (though the word isn't used) and she is kind of my hero. Her deadpan literalism lays bare the absurdity of society's expectations, and while her difference makes her vulnerable, she's far from helpless. The depiction of what she goes through is so on point. I was especially struck by the character of her sister, who's the closest thing Keiko has to an ally in her family. She gives Keiko tips on how to explain why she still works at the convenience store in a way that "normal" people will accept—but when it comes down to it, what she really wants is for Keiko to change. This kind of... conditional scaffolding is familiar to me, and was one of many aspects of the book that made me feel like if I didn't laugh I was going to cry.

I have no idea what reading this book would be like if you weren't autistic. For me it felt like having a conversation in my native language after only speaking a foreign language for years and years and years.