I often think about the time a climate scientist and his allies chained themselves to a JP Morgan Chase building. The action occurred days after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report confirming what most people felt: it was getting unsustainably hot. A cry for help had rarely been clearer, but the peaceful interruption was unfortunately met with a show of riot gear force and a few arrests. I remember watching the affair unfold and thinking: what kind of future did these experts imagine that made them take their lab coats out for a protest? Known Mysteries, a solar-powered point-and-click narrative game created by Kara Stone, may contain the nightmarish future the protesters imagined. 

Taking place in a small, near-future Canadian town called Arrow that’d fit seamlessly in an apocalypse movie, you play as a woman nicknamed Sorrow as she attempts to find out why her parents died. Along the way, you’ll discover more than a few unsavory things about the corporation employing everyone in town (and most in the nation) called (En)Launch. As Sorrow, you will visit places — like her communist-hating Uncle’s house, the town track field left in disrepair, the shady Custodial department at the local (En)Lauhch work site, and the Programming department where one of Sorrow’s moms used to work — to talk to Arrow’s residents, note clues in her journal, and get glimpses into a populace effectively held hostage by a massive fossil fuel company. 

Each chapter counts down to a Launch Day where residents watch a few lucky (?) people leave Earth for the corporate promise of a better life on Mars. The first two chapters ask you to answer a set of questions plaguing Sorrow at each chapter’s start, and the final chapter focuses on what you want to do with your new revelations. I appreciated that it asked for manual input whenever it was time to answer these queries. Allowing me to type full thoughts created room not only for self-reflection on Sorrow’s/my feelings, but also for identifying the multiple ways harm is being done rather than one. It’s a small decision that encourages more critical thinking while also checking how much you were paying attention.

An immediately arresting element of Known Mysteries is its visuals. Created by a mix of eco-friendly hardware constraints, a handcrafted approach, and Kara’s filmmaker sensibilities, it’s like watching a doomsday tape on a TV your high school science teacher rolled in. At the locations Sorrow visits, this aesthetic then adopts a scrapbook-like character where yellow blocks of text appear to the right and square, looping gifs fill the left, with the latter featuring pictures of residents gardening, lounging on porches, typing on computers, building rockets, and several other sights you might find in a brochure of the perfect small town. These visuals help create an unsettling atmosphere that highlights how eerie the mundane here is.

Learning more about Arrow and the society outside it didn’t make me feel any better about where we’re all heading. I quickly loathed (En)Launch and the ground sickness, a condition that puts people to sleep for days post-launch, that they gave Arrow’s residents from rocket fumes. I shook my head in dismay at the lottery-style system that chose future Mars residents, one so select that most people will die on an Earth that doesn’t even have as many years as it should left before ever touching down on its sister planet. I hated hearing a neighbor tell Sorrow that all the gardeners knew to wash their plants again after it rained, as the fumes from the rocket launches, despite (En)Launch claiming they are safe, may be making the rain bad for plants.

I saw an uncomfortable amount of myself in Sorrow, despaired at the sights of people happy with the current status quo, either too consumed by their own goals of a bigger house on more land, or their relief that there was food on the table if nothing else. I wanted to tear my hair out strand by strand as I unraveled the mysteries of En(Launch) and learned about the lengths they’d go to for profit. The truly unnerving thing about this point-and-click is that it felt like I was playing a horror game sometimes, and that realization only sickened me more when paired with its similarities to the real world.

In its short playtime, Known Mysteries delivers a powerful message: this could be the future, and the signs are there. While the world’s most online billionaire Elon Musk has failed to make his original Mars promise, the present holds enough parallels to make the climate urgency unmistakable. The environmental cost of the new, all-encompassing tech fad is eye-watering, and in some cases, producing enough pollution to cause breathing issues for an entire county. Families in California are still reeling from devastating wildfires in January 2025, the effects of which are being felt by even the soil where homes used to sit. Recent government cuts have lethally deteriorated the ability to prepare for the multiple once-in-a-lifetime weather events that climate change has wrought.

And while it aches me to type this, just because Elon hasn’t flown a select few to Mars yet doesn’t mean he, or someone more quiet and competent, won’t try in the future. This, along with the doomsday bunkers craze among the world’s richest, signals a powerful appetite for watching the world fall apart from a safe, distant, and expensive location.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Just like Earth’s future, the game has multiple potential endings based on your decisions in the last chapter. The one I rolled credits with left me feeling surprisingly empowered despite what I discovered. It showed how things can be better when people take action into their own hands, and that the momentum from successful societal interruptions should be taken as far as possible. With that said, it didn’t pretend like the world was fixed in a day, or even exactly better yet. The ending also reminded me that some people will act the same even when confronted with the truth, and you can only watch them suffer the consequences. 

Known Mysteries demonstrates an understanding of the people and conditions that have lit forests and movements alike on fire, acting as a playable reminder of the “or else” when climate action is not taken and the disastrous is made normal. It encourages any players who takes a peek inside Arrow to apply the environmental lessons there into their own lives, and be part of the change that ensures Earth is never abandoned.