Night after night I kept turning over the idea of who made 'antrawsna' and why it felt so familiar, and I like to think of it as the work of a small, obsessive studio called Nacre Collective, led by Eira Navarro and Soren Thal. They weren’t looking for mainstream success — they were tinkering with maps, old cassette tapes, and hand-drawn
flora in a cramped studio above a bakery. Their process reads like a diary: long walks in the wet outskirts, interviews with local storytellers, and frantic late-night sketches that became the foundation of the world.
The concept grew from a mash of ecological anxiety and folk memory. Eira was fascinated by language decay — how place names shift and lose meaning — while Soren kept bringing in dreams and soundscapes recorded in abandoned greenhouses. They cited inspirations as wide as mythic mountain tales, the mood of 'Silent Hill', and the gentle empathy of 'Princess Mononoke', but translated through a lens of botanical metaphors and human relationships. The result is a setting where landscape remembers you back, and the design choices — muted palettes, organic textures, and granular audio — all reflect that intimate, haunted intimacy.
Personally, I love that it feels handcrafted: not polished for everyone, but honest, like finding a cherished zine in a secondhand shop. It sticks with you in the same way a favorite song does.