In Funeral for the Sun, the only way to unravel a decades-old mystery is traveling back to the day it happened

Robin Bea, 23 April 2026

In 1968, a massive fire destroyed the town of Cerro Milagroso, killing its 700 residents overnight. So, how are you there the day after it happened, watching everyone carry on as usual? In Funeral for the Sun by developer Nicolás Cid Delgado, you play as a graduate student researching the mysterious disaster and quickly finding yourself thrown back in time to see it as it happens. Building on the investigative mechanics of games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Funeral for the Sun asks you to piece together the lives of the now-vanished town’s inhabitants.

You first see Cerro Milagroso as a crumbling ruin with a dilapidated hacienda at the center of town, illustrated in the game’s gorgeous, hand-painted style. Interact with a strange flower growing nearby, though, and you’re transported back in time, watching the town’s former residents eternally living out one moment in their history. Rather than just digging through the wreckage of a once-thriving town, you’re given the opportunity to peer back at some of its most crucial moments, letting these long-ago events paint a fuller picture of what actually happened here.

You’re free to flip back and forth through Cerro Milagroso’s history as much as you want to relive its past, but the real work of piecing together its final days happens in your notebook. Each time you see a new character, you’re given a photo of them to paste into the notebook, and every new name you hear is added to a running list. From your notebook, you can try to match faces to names and connect characters in a web of color-coded lines denoting familial and romantic relationships. Ominously, one color is reserved for tracking which residents are responsible for another’s death.

Even in its short demo, Funeral for the Sun has the makings of an excellent detective game. Cerro Milagroso is divided into a series of single-screen tableaus, each of which you can explore in the present and a version of its past. Children who show up in one scene might appear as adults in another, giving you a chance to follow the story of their entire life in just a few glimpses. Figuring out when two characters you’re seeing are actually the same person at two different times is a major part of understanding what happened to the town, as is tracing how their relationships to each other grow or fall apart over the years.

The main mystery of Funeral for the Sun is cutting through the lies to find what really happened here, but the clues to that case point you toward smaller puzzles as well. The demo’s final scene has you piecing together the combination for a safe from multiple birth dates, leading to a chilling revelation. While that’s the kind of puzzle you’ve probably seen plenty of in other games, what makes it work here is how you solve it. Getting the combination right means first understanding who the characters involved in the code are, how they relate to each other, and what their names are. Only then can you cross-reference your notes with a hand-labeled calendar to find the dates you need. Like the game’s larger mystery, its smaller puzzles demand that you pay attention not just to the details of the fire, but to the shifting relationships of Cerro Milagroso’s residents.

Every time I correctly sussed out a character’s name or merged two faces across time in the demo, I felt the thrill that comes from a clever deduction in any detective game. But what makes Funeral for the Sun stand out is how it brings Cerro Milagroso and its people to life. Similar games tend to rely on characters to feed you clues to their mysteries, but here, that relationship feels reversed. Yes, figuring out what really happened with the fire is what brought you here, but once you’re in the thick of it, moving back and forth through time to witness the townspeople’s joys and sorrows, that tragedy almost fades into the background. Understanding how the inhabitants of Cerro Milagroso lived and what their final days were like is motivation enough for continuing your search, maybe even more than simply finding out how the town met its end.

Part of that comes from how the game’s structure presents you with one dramatic scene after another. Each time you move to a new screen and jump back in time, you're confronted with a pivotal moment in its characters’ lives, from fires to fights to something as simple as a nice night spent with a partner. But it also comes down to how those stories are presented. In both descriptions and dialogue, Funeral for the Sun’s writing is excellent, and every scene is brought to life with vibrant art and music.

The past few years have been great for games about scribbling clues in notebooks, and Funeral for the Sun is already making a case for itself to stand among the best detective games in its opening hour. Working your way through layers of history and half-truths to find what really happened to Cerro Milagroso makes for a compelling puzzle, but it’s the captivating and beautifully illustrated story that may be the real star here.