Lofsöng and the Language That Outlives Us

Editor’s note by Carlos El Asmar

Jesse went to Tribeca and came back with a haunted hotel that sings. Now he has brought us singing stones, a shapeshifting piece of origami, and a question about how to speak to people who might exist 100,000 years from now. I’m beginning to see a pattern.

What draws me to Lofsöng is the trust it places in the person on the other side of the screen. A shape, a vibration, a patch of light can ask us to stop and work something out for ourselves. I love that. So much of our working life is spent making sure the message lands immediately. Here is a world willing to let us be a little lost.

For this next chapter of our Tribeca coverage, Jesse speaks with Unrelated Studio’s Alessandro Durando about the ideas behind that world, and the people who helped him build it. Put your headphones on for this one. The stones have something to say.

On an afternoon at Pier 57, somewhere between the chatter of a dozen playable demos and the steady flow of visitors through the Tribeca Games Gallery, I found myself in front of a screen that refused to speak. No dialogue. No map. No subtitles. Only a small figure in an oversized helmet crossing a gray desert of dust, an origami companion folding itself into the wind, and enormous concrete monuments waiting to be heard.

That game is LOFSÖNG, a world premiere in the 2026 Tribeca Games official selection, developed by Unrelated Studio, a team based in Turin, Italy. Its creative director, Alessandro Durando, sat down with me to explain how a nuclear waste repository in Finland, the idea of speaking architecture, and a Sardinian sculptor who taught stones to sing all ended up inside the same piece of software.

You explore by listening, singing to sculptures, and discovering how mechanisms respond. Your origami companion reshapes itself to carry you across the Dust Sea, becoming a kite, a glider, a sailboat, and new forms appear as the world opens up. Meaning arrives through what you do and what the world gives back.

Lofsöng at the Tribeca Games gallery, Pier 57, New York. Photo: Jesse Rylander.

A message built to outlast language

The game, Durando told me, begins with a question. How can we, as humanity, communicate with the future?

The seed of that question is a real place. In Finland, deep in the bedrock, sits Onkalo, a repository built for the long-term disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Its name comes from the Finnish word for a cavity in rock. The timescale, reaching far beyond the lives of any of us, would not let Durando go. If a structure has to outlive every language spoken on Earth today, how do you warn whoever finds it that what lies inside can kill them?

Buildings that say their own names

The first answer Durando found was architecture. Brutalism is the obvious reference in LOFSÖNG, with its raw concrete, impossible scale, and forms that feel less built than excavated. He also drew on architecture parlante, or "speaking architecture." The idea is that a building can announce its identity and purpose through form alone, without a single written word.

It is a beautiful idea, and Durando is the first to admit its limits.

A wall can tell you it is a wall. It cannot tell you why it was raised, or what it cost the people who raised it. So he went looking for a second language.

Lofsöng, a traveler among monumental concrete forms. Courtesy of Unrelated Studio.

Stones that sing

He found it in Sardinia, in the work of Pinuccio Sciola. The late sculptor spent decades carving basalt and limestone with precise incisions that turned solid rock into instruments. His pietre sonore, or sound stones, are lithophones that resonate when touched or rubbed.

For Durando, Sciola’s stones cracked the whole project open. If a rock can sing, then sound itself could be the universal language he was searching for.

The possibility of translating vibrations into patterns became a foundation for the game’s wordless world.

That logic runs through the sculptures and mechanisms you encounter. They are instruments, each with its own behavior. Some answer like the stone lithophones, others like enormous pipes. Even the protagonist’s own voice is part of the orchestra. The Tribeca demo did not yet have an original score, Durando told me, but sound was never absent, and sometimes its omission spoke just as loudly.

In LOFSÖNG, sound is not something laid over the picture at the end of the pipeline. It is the grammar the picture is built on.

Lofsöng, sound and geometry meet in a stone instrument. Courtesy of Unrelated Studio.

Seven future humanities and the weight of memory

LOFSÖNG is set so far ahead that the word "future" starts to feel too small. Languages have changed beyond recognition. Civilizations have collapsed. Humanity itself has been replaced, more than once. In Durando’s mythology, we sapiens are only the first humanity, and seven more come after us.

Each of them left monuments behind, and each monument holds that civilization’s memories, including its mistakes. The protagonist belongs to the last of these humanities, the only one still walking the Earth. As you play, you find the monuments one by one and, piece by piece, assemble a song from them. That song opens the gate to the final monument, the one built by her own people.

The title carries that idea. Durando described the song at the heart of Lofsöng as an elegy for something that is gone. The game, in other words, is you composing a eulogy for every humanity that came before you, including ours.

But Durando was clear that this is not nostalgia.

He pointed out that we tend to forget within ten or twenty years, even as we try to imagine ourselves thousands of years ahead. The real question, for him, is what we do with the weight of knowing what went wrong, and whether we use it to stop repeating the same mistakes.

There are no written words to guide you through any of this, and that is a deliberate act of trust.

You connect the dots yourself, and the meaning you build is yours.

Lofsöng, patterns spread across a platform beneath a monument. Courtesy of Unrelated Studio.

Grain, decay, and a Geiger compass

Watching the footage, I told Durando it looked like a dream, and it reminded me of a tale from my childhood called Ratatatam, a story told in many languages with that same open, otherworldly sense of space. He agreed that the familiarity is part of the design.

The most striking choice, for me, is the grain. It covers everything, and Durando sees it as doing two jobs at once. On one level, it is material, the rough, porous skin of brutalist concrete. On another, it is decay. This is a dead world, saturated with radiation, and the image is meant to feel like an old photograph that has been disturbed and ruined by it.

The same thinking shapes how the protagonist moves through it. She speaks only through vocalization, and her voice works almost like a Geiger compass, helping her read the decay around her and find her way. Her humanity has learned to endure this harsh place, but the place itself stays eerie and hard to grasp. Durando wants players to feel that tension constantly, to look at a mechanism and wonder what it is and what it is for.

You experiment, and the world answers.

Lofsöng, the traveler and origami companion cross the Dust Sea. Courtesy of Unrelated Studio.

Years in the head, six months on the screen

The story of these humanities lived in Durando’s head for years before it became a game. He imagined it as a short film, then as something that could grow into a TV series. In the end, he chose games because he believes they are one of the best media for this particular story, one where the audience has to discover meaning instead of receiving it.

Turning that story into a game concept took a few months. The first version of the demo, he admitted, was completely different from what Tribeca audiences played, and it simply did not work. So he put the project on hiatus.

What brought it back was finding the right team, people who could finally build the vision he had carried from the beginning. The demo at Pier 57 represented six months of production.

I find that part of the story quietly encouraging. Every artist I know has a project sitting in a drawer, shelved after a first attempt that missed. Sometimes an idea is waiting for the right collaborators.

Players at the Tribeca Games gallery, Pier 57, New York. Photo: Jesse Rylander.

A player willing to listen

When I asked what gamers will find new here, Durando laughed that it is up to them. But he has watched people react to the trailer and the demo, and the response tends to land in the same place. The game feels familiar and unique at once. Players mention Journey, Monument Valley, and Shadow of the Colossus, especially in its desolate, monumental landscapes.

The uniqueness, he believes, comes from where the ideas were born. Onkalo, architecture parlante, and Sciola’s stones all come from outside games, and that gives LOFSÖNG an aesthetic and a world that do not feel borrowed.

His goal is not to teach anyone a lesson.

I keep coming back to Onkalo, and to the problem of building something for a future we cannot picture. Durando’s answer to that impossible problem is not a better sign. It is a song, and a player willing to listen.

Lofsöng is in development, with its release date still to be announced. The studio lists Steam, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and PlayStation 5 as planned platforms.

Credits

Game: Lofsöng

Developer and publisher: Unrelated Studio

Creative director: Alessandro Durando

Art directors: Alessandro Durando, Giacomo D’Ancona

Narrative designer: Alessandro Durando

Gameplay & level designer: Jami Salati

Game programmers: Leonardo Formichetti, Mattia Bruno

3D artist: Diletta Scaruffi

Concept designers: Giacomo D’Ancona, Giulia Manna

Sound design: Settete (Francesco Ameglio, Andrea Bo, Marco Furlanetto, Aurora Sergi)

Music: Enrico Ascoli, Settete

Producer: Leonardo Formichetti

Administration: Diego Pizziconi

Additional puzzle design: Alessandro Barba

Character animation: Mauro Ciocia, Francesco Maria Perucatti

Rigging: Gabriele Pastè

Full game credits and special thanks.

Words and photography: Jesse Rylander
Editor’s note: Carlos El Asmar
Game imagery and trailer: Courtesy of Unrelated Studio.