A narrative adventure where you make a deal with a spirit to enter the forbidden dreamrealm in search of the woman you love.
Genre: Narrative Adventure
Engine: Unity
Playtime: 1.5 to 2 hours.
Visual Style: Hand-painted 2D mixed with low-poly 3D
Team: Solo developed
Comparable: Night in the Woods, Inkblood and A Space for the Unbound
Target Audience: Fans of atmospheric narrative adventures, magical realism, and LGBTQ+ romances
Current Phase: Prototype, vertical slice in progress
The Premise:
You play as Mora, a witch searching for her missing love, Vesna. To reach her, you make a deal with a dream spirit. But the cost is your own memories of Vesna - you must choose between your memories for access to the dreamrealm, and whatever you choose alters the narrative progression of the story.
Progression and game loop:
The Hut: You begin in Mora's hut, in first person. You light candles and draw sigils by hand to summon the dream spirit.
Choice: To pay the spirit’s price you are forced to make a choice which memory to give up, uncovering what happened between Mora and Vesna, and altering the story. Here the player learns more and more of what happened with Mora and Vesna, while Mora forgets parts of it.
Dream Exploration: You close your eyes and you are transported into a side-scrolling dreamscape based on the memories you just saw. You explore, converse with spirits, and search for Vesna in her own dream, with your cat familiar that helps you stay asleep.
You get close to finding her, but obstacles force you to use magic, and magic alerts the Warden, the guardian spirit who begins to wake you up. The dream unravels around you until you eventually wake up back in the hut.
Reset: Each time you wake, you can summon the spirit again, and offer up another memory to go back and continue your search.