A bittersweet narrative about community and growing up in unstable times is crowdfunding on Kickstarter now.
Five years ago, eighteen-year old Heidi Borge decided to make a game over the summer, just to see if she could. Technically, she decided to make five ‘mini’ games, which would all come together into one big final project, equal parts RPG and farming sim and narrative. Heidi was building worlds in her head, and she was ready to paint them across her screen. But here’s the thing about making your first game (and, really, being eighteen) - nothing ever really goes the way you expected. Now Heidi has Delphinium, five years of learning on the job and a whole lot of life experience with living in unprecedented times.
I first came across Delphinium during Melbourne International Games Week and thought, “Hey, that looks pretty funky.” Visually, the game’s style is quite striking - 3D environments with 2D sprites invoking a cute, cosy 2.5D effect reminiscent of Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler duology. Then I saw Heidi speak about the game at Freeplay: Parallels later in the week, and I knew I was sold. Farming simulators, cosy games and narratives - anyone familiar with my work here knows they’re my buzzwords. This game seemed like all of them. I had to know more.
But here’s the thing about Delphinium - it has a dark side.
Let’s go back to five years ago, when Heidi decided to make a game. Now, I don’t know if you remember this, but there was a little bit of an incident way back in 2020. Nothing major, just a global pandemic. No biggie, right? Okay, maybe a bit major. General life satisfaction fell, cosy games boomed, we all yearned for human interaction and pretended we were anywhere but the houses we were confined to. Also, just in general, things haven’t been fantastic since. I’m not saying the Mayans were right or anything, but maybe the world really did end in 2012, and we’ve been slowly hurtling into some kind of non-denominational hell dimension ever since. What does this have to do with video games? Well, Heidi came of age in this horrid blur of dystopian reality checks. At the time when she was trying to learn what it meant to be a fully-fledged adult, normal society kind of just…stopped. Her response to this (frankly grim) hand of cards? Put her original characters into Situations ™.
“It is a game I made while I was trying to become an adult…it’s my story of growing up.”
Delphinium takes place in an abandoned mountain village where our protagonist, Haiyan, finds herself trying to escape from two decades of social inequality, revolution and generalised unhappiness. Quite frankly, becoming a farmer seems easier to her than dealing with all of that (honestly, been there). However, Heidi hoped for Delphinium to force players to “[examine] the desire for escapism in a post-Covid world”, meaning you may just walk away wondering if a cottage in the woods really will fix you - or if maybe the only real fix for a terrible situation is some good friends.
At its heart, the world of Delphinium is built around the stories and connections which blossom between characters, more so than the actual crops blossoming on your farm.
“I had to ask myself, how do we establish our future in a world that doesn’t feel like it’s progressing? The answer is with community.”
The game employs a ‘connections map’ as its core feature - like a clue board in a mystery show, but instead of crime scenes, the yarn connects people, facts and memories. More importantly, the game takes place over the course of only a month, which means players will find themselves needing to prioritise their time and actively choose which relationships to nurture. This was key for Heidi, who chose to take away the expectation of the player to understand the whole history of the world, in favour of them focussing on their specific role in it.
“I hope players going into Delphinium understand that their time is brief…I want people to remember that one person is smaller than the whole world, and, in a way, it can help you feel like there is still a world around you.”
One of the features I am most excited for is the romance narratives. Since you play as a set character, not a fictional extension of yourself, Heidi has been able to organically develop relationships based on the personality of the played character and her preferences, rather than just dialogue options chosen by the player like in Stardew Valley or other tenets of the cosy genre. It’s this fact that brings about something I am most excited about upon the release of this game - I would genuinely classify this as queer. Haiyan is romantically sapphic, meaning she is attracted to women, and the storyline only allows romance to blossom between characters which make sense to have romance between them. Though this means you can’t force romance upon whatever character becomes your eventual favourite, it feels more realistic to life, and to Heidi herself, as she wrote the story citing her own experience as a lesbian. Coming off of so many games that parade themselves as queer when they simply mean the romance is player-centric, it feels like a fresh breath of air every time a genuinely queer storyline enters our screens. Haiyan being sapphic isn’t just a throw away piece of representation, either. As with real life, being queer has shaped the person she is and the connections she forms, again reminding us how important connections are for the overall game.
Delphinium is a homage to growing up when it feels a little bit like the whole world is falling down around you. The title comes from the flower of the same name, symbolising goodwill, protection and, my personal favourite definition, the heart of the dreamer. From what I have seen of this game so far, that is everything this project encompasses. Born from ambition and the desire to create, Delphinium speaks to the people we have all become in the collection of bad years, and reminds us where to find our strength. So how do we fix our world? According to Heidi, “...the only conclusion is to rely on the support of those around you”.
Delphinium is now live on Kickstarter, aiming to raise finishing funds for the game’s eventual release in 2026.
