Vendrán Las Aves is a short free game about burnout from Red String Club developers Deconstructeam

rockpapershotgun.com:

Vendrán Las Aves - "The Birds Will Come" - is a brief, quiet, hopeful game about burnout recovery. Summarised as a "slice of life tamagotchi" and available in Spanish and English, it's a gamejam production from Francisco Riolobos, Chuso Montero and Deconstructeam, the Valencia-based developers behind The Red String Club and The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.

It's free to download from Itch.io, and takes the form of a snowglobe perspective of somebody's one-room apartment. The person in question has just left their job after a rough spell, and has impulsively bought a guitar. They are also, however, totally exhausted, with barely the willpower to do anything beyond getting out of bed, let alone make music. Your task is to help them through each day and rebuild their morale till they feel able to pluck a few chords.

All this happens by way of simple resource allocation. Each day, the character wakes with a few points of energy. You must divide this between things like eating, watching TV and doing the laundry, doling out their time in such a way that they wake the next morning feeling a little more refreshed, and a little more inclined to pick up the shiny new axe propped in the corner. It's not an even process. Sometimes, you only have the wherewithal to order takeaway and doomscroll. But tomorrow is another day. One thing that comes across unsaid is the importance of asking others for help - and accepting it when they offer. If your mum comes over for a chat with a Tupperware of food, it'll save you a few points cooking that you can put towards reading a book, or doing some exercise.

I found Vendrán Las Aves to be a fair approximation of my own experiences of burnout in my twenties and thirties - that feeling of mingled emptiness and restlessness, passivity and urgency, the frustration at discovering yourself to be finite, and the growing worry that the world ends outside your apartment door. Portraying it all as a question of points might seem reductive; personally, I