Your avatar is an old lady who walks through a peaceful graveyard (soundscape à la Endless Forest). That’s it. That’s the core game design. The above was the initial concept of The Graveyard. At that point we also considered adding some gameplay to “make this more poignant and to give people something to do”. We were thinking of a game where you would try to find the answer as to where the husband of the protagonist was buried. And every time you play, it would be a different grave. When you find the grave, the lady would do something (smile, cry, talk, etc), a different thing every time. After coming up with this idea, we realized why we thought it was strong. Like The Endless Forest, The Graveyard was designed around a core activity of walking through a certain environment. This simple activity is made meaningful by defining the avatar and the environment. A deer in a forest. An old lady in a graveyard. Both immediately imply meaning. (via Tale of Tales » The Graveyard post mortem
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