‘Twilight Ferry’ Uses Emotions to Communicate in the Afterlife

Twilight Ferry sees you helping people get to the afterlife, assisting them in navigating between this lost world and where they need to go.

Inspired by Finnish mythology, this narrative-driven game doesn’t give you many instructions to start. Your character, Tytti the ferrymaiden, isn’t even sure why she is there at first. You’ll need to spend time exploring around and finding lost souls, helping them, and then bringing them to the boat so that they can cross over. You just need to figure out how to communicate with these people using your emotions in order to get that journey moving.

Although this is your job and may seem like an easy task, you currently haven’t been in this place long, and don’t quite know how to talk to people. Through communication in Twilight Ferry, you are able to sort of unlock emotions and ways to communicate further. These emotions create a puzzle where you need to find the right reactions to people so that you can help them. Someone might need comforting or help grieving their own death, while others might need some strong communication as they already are at ease with what is going on but need guidance moving on. As you learn new emotions, you can plug them into your character, picking which ones you want to use and which you do not.

I got the chance to play Twilight Ferry at Pocket Gamer Connects in Helsinki, where I was surprised to see a new puzzle mechanic that I had not seen before. The emotions and ways to use them feels like a very unique, interesting aspect. The story itself feels captivating and I really wanted to learn about my character and the people who needed help in the lost place.

Twilight Ferry is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can grab a demo from itch.io and add it to your Steam Wishlist.

About The Author

Jupiter Hadley

Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist, writing for Metro UK, Big Boss Battle, AlphaBetaGamer, and many more, all with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, judges many jams and events.