✦  A game by Gabriele Bulfon

Göbekli Tepe — The Sealed Hill

A retro point-and-click adventure about sound, memory, and the things we bury. A hill sealed for eleven thousand years — and a signal still waiting to be heard.

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Tala Engel, the game's protagonist — a pixel-art portrait
Tala Engel — Ethnomusicologist, Vienna

The game

A signal, sealed for
eleven thousand years

Vienna, November 1997. Tala Engel, an ethnomusicologist, finds an unlabelled reel of tape pushed under her door — three pulsing frequencies and no sender. Following them will carry her from a rain-lit studio to the excavation trenches of Göbekli Tepe, the oldest sanctuary on Earth.

Göbekli Tepe: The Sealed Hill is a hand-pixelled adventure told in five chapters. You look, you listen, and you solve puzzles built from real acoustics — resonance, harmonics, and the notes a stone chamber gives back when you sing to it. Every scene is scored, and every line is spoken.

Five
Chapters
1997
Vienna → Şanlıurfa
5
Languages, voiced
  • Point & click
  • Pixel-art
  • Original score

What it is

Look. Listen. Answer.

A classic adventure where the puzzles aren't locks and levers, but sound itself — frequency, resonance, and the act of really listening.

01

Point & click

Classic look–talk–use adventuring across richly detailed pixel-art scenes.

02

Built from real sound

Puzzles made of resonance, harmonics and frequency — not lockpicks.

03

Original score

Anatolian-tinted themes, played live at the piano and reshaped for every scene.

04

Fully voiced

Every line spoken — in English, Italian, French, Spanish and German.

05

Five chapters

From a Vienna archive to a chamber that answers back.

06

Handmade worlds

Pixel-art vistas of the dig, painted at golden hour.

Transmission log

Screens

Scenes from the five chapters. In-game renders incoming.

Awaiting signal
The Studio — Vienna, 1997
The StudioVienna · 1997
Awaiting signal
The Sealed Hill — Şanlıurfa
The Sealed HillŞanlıurfa
Awaiting signal
The Enclosures — Göbekli Tepe
The EnclosuresGöbekli Tepe
Awaiting signal
The Chamber that Sings — beneath the hill
The Chamber that SingsBeneath the hill
Awaiting signal
The Broadcast — Vienna, 1998
The BroadcastVienna · 1998

How it was made

Built in conversation

It began as a small experiment — could a point-and-click adventure grow out of a conversation with an A.I.? — and kept growing: first an engine, then an editor, then a world, then a story. Every step was made side by side — a human choosing, machines helping.

Engine & editor

Built from scratch

Coded idea by idea with Claude — with a custom editor to author every scene, animation and rule.

Story

From a novel

Sparked by a thriller (named in the credits), then reshaped with Claude into a tale of sound and memory.

Backgrounds

Painted worlds

Conjured with Midjourney, then hand-finished pixel by pixel in GIMP.

Characters

Frame by frame

Sprites drawn out of ChatGPT, their animation frames cut and cleaned by hand in GIMP.

Music

Replayed & reshaped

From my own “Göbekli Tepe” theme — played again at the piano and rearranged with Suno for each scene.

Sound & voice

Every word spoken

Ambience, sound effects and all the voices shaped with ElevenLabs.

The score

Music from the dark

The score is drawn from my own “Göbekli Tepe” — a piece first recorded with the band Enter on Awakening the Past. For the game I played it again at the piano in a lighter, more playful mood, then rearranged it with Suno to fit each scene — leaning into the scales and instruments of the land it's set in.