PRIM Death's Daughter in the Underworld

He takes her to the Realm of the Dead, locks her in a room with a pile of books, and enforces his strict rules. A sixteen-year-old with a dead mother and no friends does not take that well.

So Prim escapes, on her sixteenth birthday, and her own powers wake up with horrible consequences: a touch meant to help her best friend Tristan ends his life instead. Getting him back means exploring the Underworld, cutting deals with its stranger residents and facing demons, real ones and ones inside herself.

At its core this is a story about a father learning to let go and a girl finding her place. It is funny and it is sad, sometimes in the same scene, and the ending depends on the choices you make along the way.

The whole game is drawn in black and white, in a hand-painted style that sits somewhere between a Tim Burton film and a gothic storybook. Skewed perspectives, crooked architecture, characters with sharp silhouettes: every screen is composed like a comic panel, and the look gives the Underworld a personality a full-color palette could not.

The mood is carried by sound as much as by line work. An orchestral soundtrack, recorded live by Film Orchestra Babelsberg, follows Prim between the Realm of the Dead and the Land of the Living, and the full voice cast is there in English or German. The dialogue is where the dark comedy lives: Prim snarks her way through the afterlife, and the writing keeps the jokes dry even when the subject is fatal.