Bernband: The Alien and the Familiar

How a game about an alien city helped me feel more like an earthling in a post-Covid world

At some point while I was locked away from the rest of the world, trapped inside a tiny two-room apartment, I remembered Bernband.

Bernband was a bit of an indie darling on Rock Paper Shotgun back in the early 2010s (that website was where I spent pretty much all of my time back then) and although I appreciated the game, I never quite understood why.

Bernband is what many might derogatively call a ‘walking simulator’, since that’s all you can really do, but at least walking simulators usually have a plot to follow. This game just has a world. It doesn’t even have a single word in it, neither spoken nor written. It was just you, your funky alien hands and a pixelly sci-fi cityscape that was somehow very familiar and still so completely alien.

At the time of release, it was novel enough; a classic example of a short indie game that relishes in having no real point besides existing just because it can. Yeah, there’s no gameplay. Yeah, there’s no artsy point to be made, but the creator thought it would be neat. So it exists.

But then I played Bernband during a lockdown.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what it felt like. I lived right in the centre of a city, but the streets were deserted and the shops shuttered. I wonder why I ever felt like I needed to play a game about an alien city when the one outside my apartment window already felt so foreign to me.

But I did. And, to be frank, I’m struggling to put it into words. Can something feel so totally foreign but familar at the same time? Because that’s exactly how Bernband felt.

What the game presents is essentially a night on the town. The characters are aliens, but the places and the people are instantly recognisable. And what a rush it was to feel this atmosphere again. The bar with the upstart live band, who somehow sound better from outside than they do in the bar, where the bass shakes the walls and blasts out your eardrums. The patron outside who has had a bit too much and it now relieving himself in the back alley. The couple at the table speaking in hushed tones and glaring at you if you get within earshot. Down the street, tired night-shifters cross a highway of flying cars, eager to get home and out of the dangerous darkness.

It felt…almost normal. Like going on a night out in an unfamiliar town, or a first-time visit to a new country. It was refreshing to remember how that feels. After a while, I realised that I was injecting my own atmosphere into this flat-textured, low-poly world. Memories of nights from long past were filling in the gaps. The thumping music in the bar is atmospheric enough, before your brain auto-completes the smell of stale beer and the constant background chatter. Soon, I wasn’t thinking about Bernband at all. I was thinking about friends, good music and good food.

I realise that writing this makes me sound like I was some bar-hopping fanatic before Covid. That’s not even the case, I rarely went out on nights like the one in Bernband. Maybe I was just blindsided by the unexpected atmosphere of an experience temporarily lost to time. It’s just like the cliche: you don’t realise how much you enjoyed it until it’s gone.

We often talk about games which pick you up and whisk you off to some exciting, new fantasy world. Today, let’s raise a glass of intergalactic ale to the ones that plant your feet firmly back on the ground. Even if they somehow manage to do it from the back-alley of a science-fiction metropolis.

If you fancy seeing a stranger pee in public again, or maybe just want to explore an alien city, give Bernband a try. It’s free!