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.
Point & click
Classic look–talk–use adventuring across richly detailed pixel-art scenes.
Built from real sound
Puzzles made of resonance, harmonics and frequency — not lockpicks.
Original score
Anatolian-tinted themes, played live at the piano and reshaped for every scene.
Fully voiced
Every line spoken — in English, Italian, French, Spanish and German.
Five chapters
From a Vienna archive to a chamber that answers back.
A.I. worlds with a human touch
Pixel-art scenes crafted with A.I., then refined with human touch and animation.
Transmission log
Screens
Scenes from the five chapters. In-game renders incoming.
How it was made
One creator, from zero bytes
In the eighties, one person at a C64, a Spectrum, an Atari or an Amiga could build a game the world would remember. This project began as an experiment: could a single human being still do that in 2026 — story, code, art, music and voices — in spare time, with a lifetime of personal skills, and A.I. as the new tool of the trade? From an empty folder to 450 MB of engine, scripts and content — storyboard, scenes, animations, effects, music and speech — every step decided by a human hand.
Built from scratch
No Unity, no Godot, no off-the-shelf engine or editor — a custom engine written step by step, from the very first byte.
Born of necessity
The material soon outgrew any text file, so a full editor was built too — one human's cockpit for storyboard, scenes, animations, effects and dialogue.
From a novel
Sparked by a thriller (named in the credits), reshaped by its author into a tale of sound and memory.
Pixel by pixel
Backgrounds and sprites drafted with image tools, then cut, cleaned and finished frame by frame in GIMP.
Played live first
The author's own “Göbekli Tepe” theme, played again at the piano and rearranged to fit every scene.
A tool, not an author
Used the way the eighties used the assembler: to compress into spare evenings what in 2026 would take a whole team — or one creator many years.
The maker
Gabriele Bulfon is a professional composer and pianist — and a software and system engineer: first machine code on a C64, then Unix and C in the Sun era, decades of Java, and today maintainer of the XStreamOS illumos distribution. This game is where the two lives meet — a long-held dream of creating a retro point-and-click adventure, realized in spare time with his own hands, his own music, and the new tools of his era.
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 scene by scene — leaning into the scales and instruments of the land it's set in.
Support
Questions? Something odd?
The Sealed Hill is a game built by one person. If something isn't working, or you'd just like to say hello, the mailbox below reaches me directly.
Get in touch
Bug reports, a puzzle that has you truly stuck, install questions, or a note about your journey to the hill — all welcome.
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