my first itch.io game!

When I was a kid, my aunt and her girlfriend lived on the other side of the country, and my mom, sister, and I would fly to North Carolina to spend the summer with them. I loved the south, the sticky sweetness of the Krispy Kreme donuts, the sun brewed tea, and best of all: the fireflies! Magic. The story of my first itch.io game isn’t about my southern summers though: it was born in the car on the way to our red-eye flight. My dad was driving, my sister and mom were in the backseat resting before the flight. I was wide awake in the passenger seat at 1 am, cataloguing the books I would read on the flight when a barn owl swooped in front of the car. My dad pointed it out to me, and said, “you know, witches, brujas, turn into owls and steal souls. That was one of those witches out hunting!” I laughed, and went back to my books, never really thinking anything of it.

As an adult though, and searching desperately for any connections to the culture that had been assimilated away by design, I came across the story of La Lechuza. She is a witch that punishes people, takes children, strikes fear into drunkards, and haunts those who have done wrong. An encounter with her can mean death, and one of the ways to get rid of her is to loudly swear in her direction. It made me remember my dad’s story of the soul-stealing brujas that took to the sky in the skins of owls. Doing more digging, I found out that the owl was a messenger to Xibalba in Mesoamerican tales, and as many Mexican folklore, the story of the owl brujas has pre-colonial roots. This led to more reading into this folklore, so resilient even after time and pressure to forget.

All of this to say: if you want to experience a night in the wilds running from La Lechuza herself, I have just the game for you, over at https://xtinasmash.itch.io/la-lechuza. One word of warning…it is said that if you think too much about her, you can invoke her presence. If you hear a cry outside your window, or a whistling behind you, best get inside out of view of the sky. You never know what might be swooping behind the clouds…