Dujanah

Most games about war hand you a gun. Dujanah hands you a grieving woman, a string of strangers who each need to talk, and a world that looks as if someone made it from clay, paint and old photographs on a kitchen table. That is close to what happened.

Scottish indie developer Jack King-Spooner made and self-published Dujanah. It came out on September 19, 2017 for Windows, macOS and Linux. People who played his earlier Beeswing will recognise the approach: a handmade mix of claymation, hand-painted art, photographs and collage, an eclectic original soundtrack, and a steady refusal to treat “game” as a synonym for “challenge.” You play Dujanah, a Muslim woman in a fictional country occupied by foreign powers, who is trying to find out what happened to her husband and daughter. The setting is magic realist. It is grounded in real violence and faith, but talking animals, dream logic and absurd detours keep breaking into it.

Dujanah sits in the art-game corner of the market. It belongs with the empathy-first narrative games that came out of the itch.io and Steam indie scenes, not with the adventure games it resembles on the surface. It has no puzzle chains to solve and no inventory to manage. You explore and you have conversations, and each conversation carries someone’s account of death, loss, faith, violence and how people survive trauma. It also has an arcade with six minigames, boss encounters and retro Mode 7-style effects, which read partly as tributes and partly as jokes.

Reception has been split. PC Gamer wrote that the game “hurts.” Kotaku called it “gorgeous.” Those two words cover the appeal. The complaints are consistent too: slow pacing, strange interface choices, and minigames of uneven quality. Both sides of that ledger are accurate, and the complaints matter more than the praise for anyone deciding whether to buy.

• Stories told by strangers: The core of the game is dialogue. Each character Dujanah meets tells a personal story, and together those stories cover grief, faith and the aftermath of violence from many angles.
• A handmade look: Claymation, painted backdrops, photographs and collage are combined into one textured, deliberately imperfect visual style that no asset store could supply.
• The Touf Lajjel arcade: Dujanah’s hometown has an arcade with six playable minigames in different styles. They give you a break from the heavy material and comment on it at the same time.
• Retro details and boss fights: Mode 7-style effects and boss encounters add some game structure to what is mostly a walking-and-talking experience.
• An eclectic original soundtrack: The score changes mood about as often as the characters do. It moves from mournful to strange to tender.
• Low mechanical pressure: The game is single-player and ships with just two Steam achievements. Nothing about it is built to hook you.

The Core Loop Is Listening

Dujanah’s loop fits in one sentence: walk somewhere, meet someone, hear them out. On paper that sounds thin. It is also the most confident design decision in the game. King-Spooner understands that grief is not a puzzle. Dujanah doesn’t solve her loss. She collects other people’s losses, and as they build up, the picture of the occupied country becomes more complicated and more painful.

The pacing is intentional, and it will cost the game many players. The story unfolds at the speed of a long conversation with a stranger who needs to talk. Anyone arriving expecting an adventure game’s tight goal-to-reward rhythm will find the gaps between moments of meaning long, and sometimes they are. The game gives you little direction and does not reward efficiency. It wants you to wander and pay attention. That is a legitimate design goal, but there are real stretches where it reads as the game losing momentum rather than choosing a slow pace.

Tone: Grief With a Sense of Humour

What separates Dujanah from the weaker entries in the “empathy game” genre is its tonal range. Plenty of games about war treat seriousness as a virtue in itself, and the result is sincere and exhausting. Dujanah is funny. Often the humour is absurd and comes out of nowhere, and it sits next to scenes of real tenderness and scenes of real horror. That isn’t carelessness. It is how people actually cope. Trauma produces gallows humour, strange digressions and sudden warmth, and the game’s structure, a series of different voices, lets it show all of those at once without them cancelling each other out.

The fictional setting is also well judged. By placing the story in an invented occupied country instead of a real one, King-Spooner avoids the pitfalls of speaking for a specific conflict, and he keeps the themes of foreign occupation, faith under pressure and families torn apart clear enough that they can’t be dismissed as fantasy. It is a careful balance and it mostly works.

The Arcade Problem

The six minigames in the Touf Lajjel arcade are both the game’s most charming feature and its weakest. As an idea they are excellent. An arcade in a war zone is the kind of absurd, human detail that makes a place feel inhabited, and the variety of styles reads as a playful nod to the history of the medium. As games, they are uneven. Some are pleasant diversions. Others feel like sketches that never became finished mechanics, with loose controls and little depth. They are a weak spot, and a significant one.

Boss encounters raise the same issue. They add structure and occasionally a jolt of energy, but Dujanah’s strengths have never been in action design. When the game asks for precision instead of attention, the distance between its artistic ambition and its mechanical polish is obvious.

Interface and Friction

Dujanah’s interface is idiosyncratic. It reads as the work of one person building exactly what they wanted, not something shaped to smooth out new-player friction. Menus and interactions don’t always follow the conventions players expect, and moving through the world can be unclear. None of this ruins the game, but it adds a layer of friction that a more conventional project would have removed. The roughness can be read as authenticity or as carelessness, and patience decides which. A little more usability work would have lost the game nothing.

What It Adds Up To

Dujanah succeeds because it is specific. Every character sounds like a person rather than a vehicle for a theme, and the collage aesthetic matches the structure: fragments from different sources assembled into something that is only whole when you step back and look at all of it. It is not a polished game. It is an honest one, and in this genre honesty is harder to find.

This is where Dujanah makes its strongest impression. King-Spooner’s claymation-and-collage style makes the game look like a handmade object. Photographic textures sit next to clay figures, painted skies are layered behind cut-out shapes, and the maker’s hand is visible everywhere. Kotaku’s “gorgeous” is fair, although this is the beauty of a folk-art installation, not a technical showpiece. Some scenes are lovely. Others are deliberately ugly or unsettling. The Mode 7-style effects lean into the retro theme and look like quotations from 16-bit games rather than attempts at spectacle.

The UI is the weakest part of the visual package. It is functional, in keeping with the handmade look, and occasionally confusing. As a 2017 indie production built around 2D art assets, Dujanah is light on hardware by design; it is not the kind of game that pushes a GPU. The rough edges are in the interface and controls, not in demanding technology.

Dujanah is available on Steam for Windows, macOS and Linux, and that three-platform support matters for a game whose natural audience includes many Mac and Linux players who lean toward art games. Mouse and keyboard suit the exploration-and-dialogue design well, because nothing in the core experience needs fast inputs. The arcade minigames and boss encounters are where a gamepad might help, but those are also the parts where the controls feel least refined regardless of device.

With only two achievements, anyone hunting achievements will finish that list quickly. The game’s split reception is worth weighing before buying: warm overall, with a steady minority put off by the pacing and the rough mechanics. The negative takes describe the friction accurately, and they describe a lot of it.

Dujanah does not care whether it’s a good game in the conventional sense, and that stance is both its main strength and its biggest liability. Its mechanics are thin, its minigames are inconsistent and its interface asks more patience than it should, and for most players those problems will outweigh everything else. What it does well is real: a handmade, funny and painful account of what occupation and loss do to ordinary people, told through a crowd of strange, vivid voices. PC Gamer said it hurts, and it does, on purpose. If you want your games to be tight, skip this one. If you have the patience for its rough edges and the subject matter speaks to you, there is something here worth sitting with — but most people should wait to be sure that patience is there.