Here are the two things I enjoyed most about visiting Istanbul a few years ago. One: the comingling of millennia of history and a patchwork of cultures at the meeting point between Asia and Europe, a city that has more compacted history in a square metre than most places do in a square mile, an endless festival of artistic and culinary pleasures. Two: there are like a billion cats everywhere.
Pera Coda—a Disco-Elysium-inspired "surreal narrative mystery" from Turkish studio Elyzio—promises to capture at least half of that: it's "set in Istanbul, a city of beauty in chaos," and offers "a surreal rendering of one of the oldest cities in the world, featuring iconic real-world locations." I will be staging a one-man riot if there isn't a new cat every few feet, though. Standards are important.
