Echoes on Paper

2032. Summer.

Fourteen-year-old Lin Haoyang is spending the summer alone in Shanghai. His mother is on a business trip in Japan; his father has gone back to the family home to arrange his great-grandmother's funeral.

Then a box arrives from home: an empty album, a document bag, and a bundle of old black-and-white photographs.

"You've got nothing better to do this summer. Sort these into albums for me."

So Haoyang begins, one photograph at a time.

He has never met most of the people in them, and the world they belonged to feels very far away.

But every photograph, every letter, every old document points toward the story of one family.

Tracing a family through old photographs

· Sort the photographs: place more than 160 photographs into the right spots in the family album.

· Identify the portraits: click on the people in the photographs to extract their portraits, and use the clues to identify them.

· Follow the clues: read memoirs, notes, identity papers, old letters, and newspaper clippings for the details time has buried.

· Complete the family tree: match the names you collect to the portraits, fill in the family tree, and untangle the relationships between generations.

· Talk to the family: open your phone and ask relatives about the stories behind the photographs.

· Look things up: browse Kiwi Wiki for the objects, places, and eras in the photographs—or put on a record and take your time.

A century of memories, one ordinary family

The story told by these old photographs runs from 1915 to 1985.

A village in Hebei, an apprentice's workshop in Tianjin, the hide trade in Shanxi, an old house in Xi'an, a new life after reform and opening-up...

The joys and sorrows of an ordinary Chinese family are scattered across photographs, documents, and the stories relatives tell.

Across six summer days, six batches of photographs arrive. There are no countdowns and no fail states.

You can spend a quiet summer afternoon looking at one photograph, getting to know one person.

In the end

In these old black-and-white photographs, the youth they have lost remains.

And there, too, is the place we ourselves came from.

Content note: the story deals with the death of a family member and twentieth-century Chinese history. There is no graphic violence.

A note for English players

This game features a great deal of Chinese culture and customs. Players outside the Chinese cultural sphere may find some references difficult to understand. I will be adding more explanatory notes in future localization updates.