If you hang out in spaces with game devs, especially those making explicitly queer games, you’ve probably at least heard of Butterfly Soup. This 2017 coming-of-age visual novel by Brianna Lei was formative for dozens of game developers, and is overall just an exceptional piece of work about a group of four queer Asian-American teenagers as they grow up, fall in love, and play baseball. I also loved Butterfly Soup, but it’s been years since I played it, so I was thrilled to get an email recently announcing that Lei is making another new game that looks to be even more up my street.
It’s called The Crane Rider’s Tale, a visual novel/adventure game about solving a murder mystery while riding on a giant crane. You play as Mourn-No-More, a man with a giant crane named Snowfall who happens to be able to carry passengers. Early in the game, your friend Peach Blossom is killed mysteriously, and you’ll work toward solving her murder while ferrying townsfolk back and forth, chatting with them as you go. You only have so much time in the day to give rides, so you have to judiciously choose who you pick up. There are Pentiment-style skill checks on certain choices where failure still allows the game to continue, and Mourn-No-More has a Disco Elysium-like skill tree that lets you invest points in abilities like Birdsong, Third Eye, and Whimsy, which will enable you to react to situations in different ways and hopefully gain more clues.
The Crane Rider’s Tale looks beautiful, too, with some of its backgrounds repurposed from centuries-old public domain paintings, and character portraits mimicking Chinese woodblock prints. The music, too, sounds fantastic, and I was thrilled to see it’s being composed by Starling Tan, who is also working on another game with great music I’m excited for: Delphinium. Tam has already dropped one composition online:
I already know I’m going to love this one, especially since the trailer and screenshots suggest already that Lei’s writing is just as grounded and funny here as it was in Butterfly Soup. It also sounds like The Crane Rider’s Tale will have a strong reaction to player choices, as there are apparently five possible major endings, not including early Game Overs. We’ve got a while to wait for this one though. It’s just now finishing a round of fundraising on Kickstarter (it’s already exceeded its $80,000 goal) that’s intended to fully fund the rest of the game, which is currently in alpha. Lei anticipates a late 2028 release on PC, with a potential push into early 2029 if needed. That’s okay, I can be patient for my Butterfly Soup/Pentiment/Disco Elysium Chinese folktale romance game.