The Caged Birds is a satire escape from a gulag game concept, where the player has to sneak out to surrounding villages, steal, trade with other prisoners, solve mysteries and survive.

Quick story time.

There are a lot of stories about what atrocities were happening in the gulag prisons. This prison is no different, into which our unfortunate hero was sent to. Apparently, through series of lengthy and unfortunate events, he started clapping too soon to an end of Stalin’s speech, and was marked as potential “enemy of the people”. A pianist by craft, he has to survive the prison. Luckily, the prisons Colonel loves classical music being played when he drinks, saving our hero from long working hours in horrid conditions.

Our hero realizes quite soon, that this prison is build in middle of nowhere. Where this environment has absolutely no cultural or geopolitical importance, prisoners are still tasked to build a massive “victory” statue on top of a nearby mountain. For seemingly… no one? Stories are told that a new city is going to be built under this mountain, but why build a statue before building a city? Or does the statue hold another secret, is it a decoy from something? Or is it yet again another drunken side project of one of the brass?

Gameplay

The gameplay was designed around top-down stealth mechanics, with heavy story elements. Each day the player had to return to the prison, so prison was the central piece of the map design. After certain period, the player would decide to “escape”, which would trigger another act of the game, where he would be able to get out of a valley, by any means necessary…