The grand narrative that’s made it on mobile

The Serpent & The Seed is a welcome addition to the cosy games genre.

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

A mobile game still shows a robin standing close to a seated man.

Mungo and Adam.

The Serpent & The Seed is a game with a difference: an imaginative retelling of the world's greatest story. In a world overtaken by an evil serpent, you play the character of Mungo, a young robin encouraged by his owl friend to read an old, mostly forgotten book that holds the promise for salvation.

Released last Easter by Discipleship Tech (the creators of the Prayer Mate app) The Serpent & The Seed aims to tells the story of the Bible as a mobile adventure game. Turning the Bible story into an app feel like quite a novel idea. A cursory search shows that there’s no shortage of Bible based games to play on your phone, but most of them appear to be quiz or trivia based. Seeing this grand narrative, from creation to crucifixion, in game form feels both novel and inevitable, how you might imagine seeing the gospel story be put on film for the first time. “Throughout history, Christians have created, shaped and used technology for God’s glory” the Discipleship Tech website tells us; seen in that light, using a mobile game to deliver the gospel is simply the next step in a line of technological use that stretches back to the invention of the codex.

Although the game has only been in development for just over four years, it’s had a much longer gestation period than that. “It's an idea I've had for about 20 years now,” says project leader, Andy Geers, “I grew up playing lots of computer games and knowing Jesus and getting to know the Bible better… So I kind of thought: wouldn't it be great if we could combine those two things?” Geers says that the catalyst for this game was a research project. According to the Bible Society’s Lumino research project, a quarter of the UK population are "open to the Bible and finding out more". The Serpent & The Seed is Geers’ way of meeting that need.

This is clearly a labour of love for all involved and it shows. The dialogue sparkles with cheeky irreverence at times thanks to scriptwriting from Amy Green (BAFTA-winning writer/developer of That Dragon Cancer, the video game centring on the loss of her infant son, Joel). Ostensibly aimed for players ‘9+’, the narrative has to dance around some of the more unpleasant parts of the Old Testament, which it does so lightly and humorously. At one point in the Garden of Eden level, Adam tells our robin character Mungo, that naming things is hard work, and he needs a rest. Mungo then ponders whether Adam has any idea what hard work is! The framing narrative of talking animals in a world full of thistles and thorns ruled by an evil tyrant has shades of Narnia, which may have been an unconscious influence and is very much appreciated.

One particular highlight is the musical interludes. The developers aimed for the music to be a leading character in this mobile game, and the score was composed by song-writing duo Poor Bishop Hooper. When you unlock another chapter in the game, the almost transcendent songs kick in, combined with the logo appearing in its beautiful lettering, creating an enjoyable experience. It also features music from Canadian artist Jim Guthrie, whose Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP was something of an inspiration for the atmosphere of the whole game.

The game appears to be connecting with the public, many of whom are praising its art design. Greg Clifton’s illustrations are soothing and light-hearted (I’m pretty sure Moses is rocking an awesome quiff). “It seems to be pitched as a chilled, interactive story with some minor puzzle solving, a subgenre that is increasingly popular these days,” writes gamer and RS teacher Natalie Minaker. “I imagine that this game can provide a few hours of mental respite to any stressed-out Christians!”

Unfortunately, the lack of challenge is hard to avoid mentioning. As this game is telling a very well-established story, there’s very little jeopardy and as a result, the pace lags a little in parts. “The gameplay is gentle and seems to promote a sense of mindfulness rather than any real sense of peril or challenge,” continues Minaker. In certain levels there are Christian themed takes on popular mobile games - Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, and even Snake (which will be a pang of nostalgia for those of us who had a Nokia in the 90s). What is clear is that playability takes a back seat to story here, and when that story is the Bible, that’s understandable. There’s also a distinctly estuary English accent to the voices shouting “hosanna” as Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey which might momentarily take you out of the story, but this is merely nitpicking.

Whether it will effectively compete for pre-teens’ attention in a saturated market remains to be seen, but this is another useful tool to have in a kids or youth leader’s toolkit. It might also serve as the kind of homework an RE teacher could set that the students might enjoy completing! Older gamers or committed Christians might not find much of the content particularly revelatory, but they may find its gentle pace and soothing aesthetics a welcome addition to the emerging ‘cosy games’ genre.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.