First things first: we’re 33% off in GOG’s Summer Sale, and today is Stop Cyberbullying Day. Cyberbullying is a cause close to our hearts,
having been on the wrong side of it once. We’re keen to encourage a better understanding of how even benign-seeming interactions on the
internet can contribute to people having a really rubbish time. So we’re #stopcyberbullyingday sponsors, and we’re donating 100% of
Cultist‘s revenue today to CyberSmile, the internet charity behind it all. Please buy Cultist and support the cause! Or, y’know, just donate if
you already own a copy. ♥

Now, onto bizniz. BOOK OF HOURS? Remember that? Alexis has been getting into some core design work this sprint, and has produced the single most juicy design doc I’ve ever seen him make. I’ll let him talk it through…

Here’s a very early, long-superseded draft of the skills system in BOOK OF HOURS:

(1) my games generally outgrow early design documents and the early docs get cast off chrysalis-wise, but I’ve learnt that it’s useful to hang on to the discarded husks. The design process is often like roaming a semi-wilderness, and you’ll never have a definite map, just a series of explorer’s diaries. Earlier diary entries may describe places you’d thought were unhelpful, but you later want to return to. Pixar used the phrase ‘exploring the neighbourhood’ to describe this incremental quality.

(2) you’ll notice a mixture of hard numbers, fluffy design notes, and extremely fluffy design notes. This ties into the incremental, exploring-the-neighbourhood, exploring-the-forest aspect of the design.

The arrows tend to go one way, but later steps inform previous steps. I might start with something like this:

but a lot of those numbers are obviously just easy multiples of 5 or 10. Most of the time you may as well stick with the easy multiples, because it makes everything more intuitive and you can tweak elsewhere, but often you’ll want to go back and change it. Or as the lore develops, you’ll think, crikey, Winter stuff should work differently, and you’ll go back into the mechanical design to change it.

Back to the skill design.

(3) Some of those skills are very flavourful, some less so. Nyctodromy is an invented word (thanks Matt for Greek etymology help!) which plugs back into the lore of the game. But ‘Horticulture’ is a more traditional top-down way to try to characterise skills – the kind of thing it’s useful in the real world to decide to read a book about, or score an interview candidate on, but not necessarily the kind of thing you’d use to distinguish one interesting character from another in a game. You get a lot of this sort of thing in skill systems (and I know, cos I’ve written a lot of them and done a lot of this sort of thing). It’s not always what you want. Let me move to a concrete example.

All the green-highlighted items are things that would conceivably fit under ‘Horticulture’. But isn’t this more fun? The system goal is to let people learn the world and define their characters (both as librarian and as library), not for us to assess the character’s career suitability as a guardian.

Of course, there’s a fierce complexity cap here. One of the problems with all my games, from Fallen London onwards, has been what you’d expect from an ADHD designer working in an ADHD framework: everything can connect to everything, and that’s sometimes exciting and sometimes a problem. It don’t fit easy in a spreadsheet and it don’t sit easy in a player’s mental model.

As has now passed into Weather Factory legend, Lottie got talking to a man on a train and the man turned out to be Ian Livingstone and Ian, when he saw the Cultist prototype, advised us to put a map in it to show people where to go and so almost at the last minute, we added the Mansus:

and for Exile, we made sure to add this:

and the equivalent for BOOK OF HOURS started as this:

and now Lottie’s turned it into something more coherent and attractive, though still extremely draft, which is this:

If you spotted any resemblances between that and our BOOK OF HOURS road map, you’re paying attention, award yourself a nine-pointed gold star.

See you next time.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hard at work on The Lady Afterwards, which I was delighted to see get a really positive reception! To answer two common questions I’ve seen floating around:

“Will there be a digital edition, too?“

Yes, we fully intend to release the limited edition boxed version along side a cheaper digital download. We just haven’t confirmed how that will work yet, so don’t want to promise it and then have to renege. You won’t get the full experience (e.g. we can’t send you candles in PDF form), but you’ll be able to play TLA whatever your budget.

“I want a boxed edition! But the 100 boxes of the limited edition will sell out really quickly…“

We hope they do! Based on the response so far, we’ll probably produce more copies after the 100 limited edition boxes are sold. They might look slightly different, but they’ll still have everything you need in ’em – just like our follow-up run of the Tarot of the Hours after their limited edition sold out.

Now, some actual updates on the game.

I’ve been working on the all-important character sheets, trying to create something that feels TRPG-ish, doesn’t require anyone to have any experience in TRPGs in the first place, and feels true to Cultist Sim. The above is the character sheet for the Dancer, for instance: double-sided, with personal details and skills on the front, and character details and notes on the back.

Here’s the questionnaire in more detail, for anyone who’d like to create their Dancer character now.

I’ve also been working on the soundtrack for the game, which will be a QR-code-unlocked Spotify playlist (hence the need to pixellate). I’m a massive early jazz / easy listening fan, so this is my opportunity to get some 20s vibes up in everyone’s grills.

I also finished the map of Alexandria, which players will explore in their efforts to hunt down Audrey Leigh Howard. There’ll be a lot of lore here, but the first thing you’ll probably notice is a tentative search area for the elusive Serapeum…

Finally, for Fascination points, I leave you with this trenchant quote from the back of the box. Make of it what you will.

Oh, and a long-awaited revamp of the merch corner happened this sprint! So I’ve finally managed to get rid of all the cardboard boxes scudding around our eyrie and have everything neatly aligned on copper shelves. This is where all orders come from if you buy anything on the Etsy shop. Hush House vibes, eh?

We’re going on holiday in a week’s time, so there’ll likely be another pause in updates while we’re away. But more on BoH, The Lady Afterwards and the tarot soon. 🕯

Society is opening up about mental health, destygmatising something that affects a huge number of people. But you don’t hear about their lovers and supporters, their family members or their best friends. There must be millions of people out there supporting and coping with seriously depressed loved ones. Weirdly, Millar’s piece is the first article I’d ever seen about it.

Loving someone with depression is a common experience. Talking about it isn’t. Here’s what I’ve learned from loving a depressive partner – it may sound familiar to you.

.         .           .

Alexis, my fiancé, is a professional writer. He’s eloquent, loquacious and fiercely intelligent. But when he’s depressed he can barely communicate. It seems to cause him physical pain to talk about his feelings, and anhedonia makes him bored and disinterested in the world. So he can’t tell me, his fretting girlfriend, how bad he’s feeling, and it’s difficult for me to judge how worried I should be.

He can rate the severity of the episode on a scale from 1 to 10. 1 is ‘having a bad day’. 10 is ‘suicidal’. Or he can tell me where the Black Dog is: at the far end of the garden; prowling around the front door; glaring down at him, right next to the bed. This sort of communication helps connect Alexis to the world and helps me understand what he’s going through. One of the nastiest parts of depression is that insulating isolation that descends around the sufferer, separating them from the love and support of the people around them. Our odd couple’s language stops that isolation from taking over completely.

When our relationship was new, I tried to ‘fix’ Alexis’s depression. Trying to cheer up a depressed loved one is a natural response, but it’s also – I know now – naïve. Being particularly nice to someone isn’t going to rewire their brain. Tea and chocolates can’t dismiss a pervasive existential sense of hopelessness. You can’t ‘fix’ mental health.

You can help, though. One of the most useful things I do is anticlimatically boring: I just stay near him. His worst moments usually last no more than twelve hours, when he’ll stay in bed, curled up in the fetal position with his back to me. Sometimes his depression is so severe that his skin hurts if you touch him, so I can’t even rest a reassuring hand on his arm. Sometimes it helps to put music on. Other times that hurts him, too. But however bad the episode, he always says afterwards that it helped not to be alone. It breaks that crippling depressive isolation. These days, when it gets bad, I just sit next to him in silence and read.

I’ve also encouraged him to seek external help. I’m not a doctor or a psychiatrist, so I’m woefully underqualified for anything other than unconditional love. Depression makes people less likely to seek help or reach outside their comfort zones. So encouraging your loved one to look after themselves, see a therapist or consider anti-depressants can really change their life for the better. It also takes the pressure off you – you don’t have to be lover, parent and therapist. You can just be you.

.      .      .

Alexis’s depression is for life. I know that part of being with him is accepting that three or four times a year he’ll have a serious depressive episode, and I will be correspondingly miserable. This is what it means to love a depressed person.

Over time, depression can ruin relationships. We spoke early about the effect it might have on us: his biggest worry was that it would eventually drive me away. Six years later, I’m confident it won’t. But I can absolutely see depression being the end of many otherwise lovely relationships, and don’t blame the partners of depressives for getting out. I’ve thought about it myself, and I suspect if you gave a depressive the option of a total cure at the cost of ending their relationship, many would leap at the chance.

Our more alarming discussions were about depression and suicide. Alexis’s brother killed himself when he was twenty-one, and Alexis has had several periods in his life where he’s been in the final stages of suicidal ideation (planning the method, carrying around a suicide note – the end-game things). I knew nothing of the disease when I first met him, so worried that every time he was depressed he might want to die.

I know now that your suicide risk from chronic depression is much more like metal fatigue, where small fractures over time build up to a breaking point. Alexis often talks of ‘wrestling the angel’, referring to the active effort he has to put in to thwart a depressive episode. You really have to rage against it, time and again, like battling your way through dense jungle. Over time you get tired. I can imagine that many sufferers who find themselves in an acute depressive crisis after years of wrestling the angel just don’t have the energy anymore. I can see the attraction of making it all stop.

Alexis struggles to talk about suicide when he’s very low. So like the Black Dog, suicide has a nickname: the Salesman. In particularly horrible moments, the Salesman comes round and tries to sell Alexis death. The Salesman’s vilest feature is he’s as smart as the person he’s trying to convince, and he knows his weak spots. It’s difficult to win an argument against yourself. But the moniker makes it easier for Alexis to mention it, and I’ve made him promise on everything he holds holy (his mother; freedom of speech; gin) to tell me whenever the Salesman appears. It gives me a sense of security to know that even if my partner is fleetingly thinking about ending his own life, I’ll know. One of the most common regrets I’ve heard from people who’ve lost loved ones to suicide is not seeing the signs in advance. If Alexis keeps his promise, I will.

.      .      .

The brilliant nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered from chronic depression. He wrote a number of poems – the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ – during particularly black moods, and this always stuck with me:

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.”

– “No Worst, There Is None” (1885)

I have never hung there, in depression’s frightful chasms. But I don’t hold depression cheap. I’ve watched it closely for six years. It’s fantastically malign and brilliantly coercive. I respect and despise it equally.

But this leads me to my final, painfully simple conclusion. You, the partner or family member or friend, matter too. Depression is a proper illness. It has physical symptoms. It can change the person you fell in love with so much that, for a time, you hardly recognise them. And it’s contagious. It affects everyone around it. So you need to look after yourself.

The cosmic roll of the dice which decides which brains misfire and which don’t is unfair. So I like to think I’m evening the odds, even a little, by supporting my partner through his black moods and loving him in spite of them. I wish he didn’t have to suffer, and I wish I didn’t either. But you have to treat reality as it is rather than you’d like it to be. There are millions of couples living with the Black Dog, just like us. The ones that stay together develop their own individual coping strategies. It’s hard work, but so is living together, long-term relationships and having kids. “Nothing worth having comes easy”, and a good relationship with a person you love is the thing worth having most of all.

Arthur Ashe was a pretty cool guy. He contracted AIDs from a blood transfusion but turned it into safe-sex awareness campaigns. He founded ethnically integrative programmes for people without health insurance twenty years before Obamacare. He grew up in the 40s in segregated Virginia and went on to become the only black tennis player ever to win the Australian Open, the US Open and Wimbledon.

He also had a pretty cool motto.

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

I’ve found it surprisingly useful in games.

Devs do a lot of talking. Over the last decade I’ve heard increasingly frequent discussion of sexism and feminism, ethnic diversity, sexuality and gender, and whether you can play games on easy and still call yourself a gamer. But for all the noise on social media and all the panels at events, I don’t see the same level of activity in real life. We talk about problems, but do we do that much about them?

I think there are three reasons why we don’t. Firstly, actions are harder than words. Secondly, it’s easy to feel that sharing a post or by talking about a problem is the same as actually fixing it. Thirdly, the industry issues we talk about are all big problems: it’s not ‘we’ve run out of milk’, it’s ‘solve homophobia’, or ‘get more black schoolgirls to code and apply for programming jobs when they’re older’. I can see why faced with a problem like that, it’s hard to know where to start.

A new genre of games emerged over the last few years which reflect this sense that everything’s too much. #selfcare or Kind Words are good examples: they’re designed to give players a dedicated space to do something small and easy and feel good about it. More widely, escapist wholesomeness like Animal Crossing or Ooblets are more and more in demand, their popularity directly proportionate to how stressed and unhappy we are in real life. 

We all need an escape from reality, particularly in a global pandemic. And games about being kind to yourself are great. But doing your laundry in #selfcare doesn’t do your laundry in real life. Playing diverse games won’t encourage more black women to code. To make our industry a better place, we need to do things in the real world. But you don’t have to solve a problem definitively or find the ultimate cure-all. You can just help a bit. Spend an extra half hour finding unusual jobs boards to widen your likely pool of applicants. Update your HR policy with more generous parental leave. Enter your salary into the UK game dev salary list to foster equality and catch the gender pay gap.

Retweets are marginally better than not doing anything at all, but real-world acts are better. If we see any flaws in our industry, any at all, it’s our problem. Not someone richer, or someone more famous, or someone with probably more time on their hands. Games will be a better one if we take a more moderate, more achievable approach to social change.

Don’t worry if your game doesn’t tackle all possible diversity at once. It’s okay if you haven’t donated to every charity listed on UKIE’s website. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. Even if it’s small, it’s something.

Firstly: CULTIST SIMULATOR IS COMING TO THE SWITCH! 😱😱😱 We announced yesterday that we’re bringing the whole game and all DLC to the Nintendo Switch, courtesy of our magnifique mobile partners, Playdigious.

We’ll have more info for you on WHEN and HOW MUCH and WHAT EVEN IS THE BLACKBONE ANYWAY.* For now, wishlist the game via our very professional button, below!

(Wishlisting works pretty oddly on the Nintendo eShop, so this is actually a ‘tell me important news about the Switch like when it’s actually available to buy’ list. But we’re using it as a wishlist, so please, sign up!)

This sprint we also announced the release date for EXILE on mobile, and it’s soon! EXILE’s coming to the App Store and Google Play on Tuesday 3rd November 2020. That’s this Tuesday! It’ll launch alongside a slightly discounted all-DLC IAP called the Forbidden Bundle, for anyone who’s been savvily waiting for a good deal.

Yesterday we also pushed live our German and Japanese localisations, meaning you can now play Cultist in five languages on all stores. We’ll put live an updated Russian translation soon too, which should be more consistent across the game and DLC – look out for that! We’ll continue to update the improve these translations, so feel free to keep those loc bugs comin’. Thank you to everyone who sent one in so far. <3

It’s Halloween, so we’re also in a bunch of different sales right now. You can get some of the highest discounts we’ve ever run in Steam’s or GOG’s Halloween sales, and we’re also running a cross-the-board sale on mobile to celebrate Switch and EXILE (iOS / Android). Enjoy!

I also have a confirmed release date for our zingara fortune-telling deck, now that our 1,000 decks are in production. I’ll push ’em live on the Church o’ Merch on Friday 20th November, just in time for Christmas! So you can get all your friends and family the gift of a 1920s possible promise of widowhood or misfortune through caprice.

Finally, you thought we’d FORGOTTEN about it but we HADN’T! I give you the penultimate episode of our first season of Skeleton Songs, where we make good on a promise we made in Episode 5 and tell you all about maenads and kittens. Hope your ears are READY, frends, for ‘DIONYSIAN NO PICNIC’. Have a spooky weekend!

*lol as if I’d ever talk to you about the Blackbone.

★ Please share this salary spreadsheet as widely as you can! The more data it accumulates, the more accurate and useful it is. ★

In February 2019, I set up a Google Form and Google Spreadsheet to track anonymised game dev salaries in the UK. British indie games isn’t centralised and we don’t have standardised wage expectations. A self-populated communal spreadsheet is the best solution I’ve come up with to give a general picture of what jobs tend to pay – and there’s a lot of variation.

Below are the average mean salaries the ~700 entries come up with. Please note these numbers are really rough as they don’t take into consideration regional variance, years’ experience or benefits. For a more accurate idea of how your salary compares to others’, search the ‘Salaries’ tab!

Production

• • Senior producer – £49,833

• • Producer – £30,196

• Junior producer – £24,005

Art

Design

Writing

• • Senior writer – £36,500

• Writer – £26,500

Code

• • Senior coder – £51,785

• • Coder – £36,672

• Junior coder – £22,239

Audio

• • Senior sound designer – £40,000

• • Sound designer – £27,000

• Junior sound designer – £21,000

QA

• • Senior QA – £23,789

• QA – £21,099

Marketing

• • Senior marketer – £42,678

• • Marketer – £34,600

• Junior marketer – £33,000

There aren’t many surprises here. Production, code and technical disciplines (like technical artists or UI/UX designers) are the best paying jobs in games, with 2D/3D art and QA at the bottom. So far, old news. But these numbers also offer two new things:

One, they give a general value baseline against which you can measure your own salary. It’d be great if this reduced the chance of devs being underpaid because they don’t know their job’s worth.

Two, they give an idea of likely salary expectations for people considering games. We’ve long known that rich coders work in FinTech, but an aspiring 2D artist couldn’t guess how much they’d be making ten years into the job. Perhaps this data will help inform those creativity vs. financial security decisions.

Some caveats

If the numbers above look hinky to you, please add your past and current salaries to the Google Form to make them more accurate. I’m the only person who has editing rights on the sheet, and the Google Form doesn’t give me any more information than what you see on the public spreadsheet.

It’s worth comparing a job’s average salary with the specific data points in the spreadsheet. Even discounting regional wage difference, there’s a huge amount of salary variance across the same job. Some developers seem to have generous salaries; others are paid peanuts. Careful who you work for!

You’ll notice that there aren’t average salaries for more meta jobs like CEOs, managers or team leads. There was such variance in job titles, duties, size of studio and money that you just can’t meaningfully compare those salaries with one another.

I attempted a comparison of male versus female average mean salaries per discipline, but the data pool is too limited. The result is more misleading than useful. If the spreadsheet grows significantly, I’ll revisit to see if we can come up with useful gender pay comparisons.

I also attempted a regional wage comparison per discipline, but it also failed because of the small number of relevant data points. As above, I’ll revisit this if the spreadsheet grows.

Let me know in the comments if you see things in these numbers I haven’t! And if you can, please share the Google Form and Google Spreadsheet with other developers. The more data we have, the better.

Hey, Believers! Alexis’s and my sprint have been dominated by a troupe of giggling Portuguese carpenters who came in and built a floor-to-ceiling library with sparkly lights and a rolling ladder. This has been a dream of Alexis’s since childhood, and once we get the ladder installed we will be staging Weather Factory’s version of that scene from Beauty and the Beast.

In more serious news, it’s the end of the month, so this also means we give to CHARITY! This month’s pick is Médecins Sans Frontières and their coronavirus crisis appeal, and thanks to you (probably) we’re able to donate a whopping

Not bad for a microstudio! This’ll really make a difference, so if you shared any Weather Factory stuff or bought any games or merch or anything, thank you very very much. 💖

Now, EXILE. Firstly, the DLC page is now live in nascent state on Steam – so wishlist it! Make sure you get a ping on launch day (Weds 27th May!), which just so happens to coincide with Cultist Simulator‘s second anniversary weekend. COULD OTHER EXCITING THINGS HAPPEN AT THIS TIME? Only the Hours know.

We’re now just under a month away from release, so Alexis is steaming away finishing content so we can complete our Chinese and Russian translations, while I am beavering away on art and production and marketing like the hounds of administrative Tindalos.

Because we are very lazy and unambitious at this studio, Alexis somehow concocted a world of thirty-three cities with seven off-map end-points where you have to face the music and die. I mean dance. Do I?

To give you some sense of the geography involved, here’s a map:

You travel the world from a randomised starting point, travelling neighbour to neighbour in your quest to make money, evade your past and avoid your Foe, who is basically the Terminator in text. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

Alexis has, I think, done a wonderful job of creating different atmospheres in just a few sentences. My postcards home are always variants of ‘ate some food, have a bed, sometimes there is the sea’. But he just has to show off. Compare Candia-Heraklion…

“A hard two decades. The Asia Minor Disaster; independence, and the Union with Greece; and then a monkey bit the King to death. But the Cretans and their island have endured four thousand years, and they endure still. The harbour is mountainous with fortifications, but Heraklion lies quiet in the afternoon sun.”

…with its neighbour, Alexandria.

“Dignified men of business in tall red hats and immaculate white suits outside the Bourse; British soldiers bickering drunkenly by a melon-slice stall; theosophists playing backgammon in the Cafe Al Aktar. At the Rialto in Safiya Zaghloul Street, they’re showing a German film about waxworks, but the power goes off and on and off again. Behind the curtain of night, the Invisible Serapeum waits.”

Then of course there are the lights of the Khayam Boulevard flickering to life; the drunken tsuica fight with bricklayers; the lamp-light of Little Paris on the points of the Iron Wolf’s teeth; the ancient clockwork lighthouse, here by the dark sea. You get around in Exile.

It feels really, really good to travel while the real world stays in lockdown. I can appreciate it even while I motor my way through a rather intimidating list of art. Along with some snapshots of your travels (can you tell where they are?), meet Zulfiya, who never goes anywhere without her scissors; Orsolina, who doesn’t get on with orthodontists; Chaima, sometimes called the Snare; and Mireya, who is definitely just a lovely painter and nothing more.

(Call me Cat Caro, but I have a prediction. That prediction is that Vasil, that handsome chap in the red, will become something of a fan favourite. He’s……….. memorable.)

Aaaaanyway. In merch news, our new round of the Tarot of the Hours goes live later today, and you can now sign up to a tarot-specific mailing list to be notified immediately when they go live. If you missed our announcements earlier, we’re now releasing the tarot in batches of 200 so I can e.g. continue to do my job rather than spend my entire life shuffling packages from my living room to the post office. LIKE A SPOOKY PACK MULE IN A FACE MASK.

I’ve also been working on those new pins. All of them are now in production, apart from Marinette who’s being difficult because of course she is. >:( More news later.

Finally, Skeleton Songs! You thought we’d binned it off, didn’tcha? Well, we HAVEN’T. We just ran out of time these last few sprints and it’s the easiest thing to jettison from the hot-air balloon of our lives. This episode we talk madness, blood, ladies and how much simpler everything would have been if people had just talked to each other. Listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you gosh darn like.

That’s it for April. Wish us luck with Exile, and may a bunny hug of percussigants dance between you and COVID-19. ♥

Hey, Believers! Hope you’re all doing okay in lockdown. It’s not fun, is it?

Lancing this cloud of gloom like a wafer through ice-cream are the Priest and Ghoul DLCs, which launched on mobile yesterday. They’re available as £1.99 IAPs, and Cultist Simulator is 50% off for a week on the App Store and Google Play Store to celebrate turning one. 🎂

Mathilda, Communication Manager at Playdigious, wrote a piece for Pocket Gamer about our first year on sale from a porting and sales perspective. I wrote a companion Gamasutra piece sharing all the data we have: sales figures, ratings, features, etc. If you’re in a pondering, number-crunchy mood, give ’em both a read.

Now, an Exile update. Cultist is a deceptively big game, and writing DLC for it had got really difficult. Alexis needed to find interesting mechanics each time, and those mechanics needed to interlock meaningfully with the mechanics that were out there. It’s even harder now that we’ve localised the whole game, because it’s very difficult for Alexis to go back and change existing content.

Then he watched a couple of seasons of Ozark. The protagonist is burdened with an extraordinary sum of extremely illegally obtained money that they need to dispose of quickly and safely. It was the total opposite of the usual Cultist Funds tension. What if, in Cultist, you had as much money as you needed, but you were in constant danger and had to think hard about how you could safely spend it and stay ahead of your pursuers?

It didn’t sound practical as a DLC theme, because it would mean completely re-inventing half the game. If you were on the run, you couldn’t send out expeditions or built up books in the same way. The Suspicion mechanics would have to work very differently. You probably wouldn’t even have a cult.

Then it occurred to Alexis that this was also an opportunity. If he blew up all the mechanics the player was used to, then he wouldn’t have to integrate all my new systems with them, and they’d have the fun of rediscovering how everything works from scratch. It might just take too long to build, but it might also take less time starting over without worrying about fitting everything that already existed.

He spent a week prototyping. He got enough working to be confident that it would be a big chunk of work, but not a crazy big chunk of work. The core loop was this: you’d land in a city, you’d set up capers and operations with your contacts, you’d convert the stolen goods into cash, and then you’d pick your moment to run. Run too early, and you’d lose opportunities. Run too late, and your pursuers might catch up with you. He had an idea for the stolen goods and the pursuers, too, something he’d wanted to get into the game for a while: the reckoner mobs, the illicit dealers in years who existed uneasily alongside the taxonomy of Know and Long.

Your final goal would be to disappear, with as much luxury as you could arrange for a comfortable retirement. Your other final goal would be an Edge ascension – something our players had long hungered for – but that would come in an unexpected way. Exile’s got seven different shades of the victory conditions at the moment.

It’s a big one – right now, it looks like it might be as big as the Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLCs put together. (😱) Let’s hope it works out! At least – and he didn’t expect this at all when he started in January – after a couple of months of lockdown, people might be more in the mood for a dramatic flight across Europe and beyond.

The closed, secret beta will start next week, so this is your last chance to register for a potential invite! Help us make Exile exilent. 😎

Meanwhile, this was my life.

FOR BASICALLY A WEEK STRAIGHT. This means I have no new Exile art to show you, but all tarot decks (and various other merch orders) are now on their way to their respective owners, who were very patient and didn’t get too cross with someone trying to send out a zillion parcels in the middle of a global pandemic.

For those who missed out on the lightning-quick limited edition, we have another 1,000 decks coming in a couple of weeks. They won’t be numbered, but otherwise they’ll be exactly the same. Check the Church of Merch in mid-April-ish, or watch this space for an announcement that they’re back up and buyable again. 🙂

Finally! We were too busy this week to record another Skeleton Songs, so episode five’ll be out next sprint instead. We are able to make our first donation to coronavirus-y charities, though! This month, you helped us raise…

Thank you! This’ll go to the National Emergencies Trust. Next month we’ll donate to Médecins Sans Frontières, and the month after that it’ll go to the Trussell Trust. Spread the word if you can, and keep safe! ♥

Sooooo. Everyone really likes tarot decks.

We sold all of our 500 decks within 36 hours. Thank you so much if you ordered one! My phone makes a cash register cha-ching noise every time we sell something on Etsy so it was the closest I’ll ever get to

BUT. We seriously underestimated how many people would want this tarot. Coronavirus means some people don’t have the money right now, or that they don’t want physical packages coming through the post. The decks went so quickly and it’s such a difficult time that we feel it’s unfair to disappoint people because I simply underestimated demand. So: we’re going to extend the Tarot of the Hours by another 1,000 decks.

To keep the exclusivity of that first batch, we’re not going to number the decks anymore. Only the first 500 are officially part of the limited edition. But we do want to make sure people have an opportunity to buy this deck, regardless of situation or job security or COVID-19 nonsense. MAY THE HOURS PROTECT YOU.

The new batch is in production now. I’ll announce their restock (in probably a couple of weeks…?) on Twitter, Facebook and reddit. View the ~ secret ~ delisted Etsy store page in the meantime! Delight in currently unattainable occultism! The real-world equivalent of not being able to enter the Mansus ’cause you don’t have the right goddamn card. 🤘

10,000 boos to COVID-19

The games industry is in a fortunate position. Many of us are naturally unsocial creatures who work on digital products that aren’t affected by real-world supply chains currently being severed by COVID-19. We’re a two-person family business who work from home, anyway.

Alexis and I wanted to do something useful in this crisis to pass on that good fortune. For the next three months, we’re going to give 10% of our total monthly profits to charities who can help. This includes everything on our digital stores (Steam, GOG, Humble and itch.io) and all our physical merchandise in the Etsy store. For the avoidance of doubt, this includes the tarot deck!

We’ll share the amount we’ve raised at the end of every month, so we can all feel good for having helped. Yay!

National Emergencies Trust

They step in whenever there’s a major national crisis in the UK. Working with the noble British Red Cross, they’ve launched a major coronavirus appeal.

Medecins Sans Frontieres

Also known as Doctors Without Borders and very dear to Alexis’s heart. An international and life-changing charity getting medical aid wherever it’s needed the most.

The Trussell Trust

A British food bank charity making sure the poorest and most vulnerable people are cared for. Coronavirus must be bloody awful for people who were already struggling financially.

We may extend this initiative for longer than three months. It depends on what the hell happens with COVID-19. Here’s hoping we don’t have to.

The theme of July seems to be waves, I’ve decided. There’s a heatwave which no one enjoys and by no-one, I mean me, Claire. There are the waves of Brighton beach where the Weather Factory team spent a week at Develop Conference and finally, we won multiple accolades at the Develop Star Awards. It was an immense intense week, we slept hard and so post dreaming, let’s recap everything.

For those that don’t know Develop Conference is held every year in Brighton, usually in July which means the weather is often quite nice and quite warm. The consolation for us day vampires is that being by the sea air helps and there’s an abundance of ice cream options around. This year was special for two primary reasons. We were going as a full WF team and we were up for multiple awards. Awards are not why we make games, but it is a nice feeling to be nominated.

Develop is an event that is heavily focused on the business side where people can network, attend talks and for game devs to show of their games. The event is also open to the public which is great as that allows games to gain more exposure and vital feedback. It’s also wonderful from a recruitment point of view as many companies will use Develop to showcase their openings.

So let’s continue with what we actually did at this gaming conference. First up Lottie gave a talk with a title based on the core ethos of Weather Factory: Fun, Safety, Profit.

She explained with lovely slides and stellar memes the origin story of WF, how strategies were determined and managed and the results of our first year. This talk was incredibly useful for indie devs starting out and feeling daunted. Or those that have been around for a couple of years but need advice on how to continue to strive. Here’s where you can go through the presentation yourself and find out why gold sushi is prevalent and a woman carrying a hipflask is considered fitting under the category of safety.

On the Tues and Weds of Develop there were two award ceremonies, where either individuals or the entire WF company were nominated. First up was GameDevHeroes awards, where Lottie was up for Best Producer wooo and I was up for Best Marketing and Comms person wheee. The venue was packed with other nominees and supporters of their colleagues and after a quick slug of a pint they kicked off the announcing winners fairly fast. It’s always good when these events just get straight to the meat of things and even better if meat is supplied.

Oh we didn’t win by the way, which might be where I should have kicked off. Nevertheless, we were glad to be nominated, found the little comments beside nominee names to be super charming and interesting…We were impressed by how well run the event was, so big thank you and whoops towards Dan Dudley and Alex Boucher!

The next day was a big one. We were very civilised and ate bits of kraken with Bossa Studio‘s Co-Founder Imre Jele, gamedev Husban Siddiqi and Yves Le Yaouanq,  Innovation Manager at Ubisoft. We talked about many things, but the main take away was that we all have far too many games in our backlog to get through, that even more wonderful games continue to come out and it’s making us cry a bit.

Some more meetings/interviews occured, games were checked out and a very important ice cream reprieve was had before the preparation process for what was to come.

The Develop Star Awards were that evening. We were nominated in 4 categories, Best Narrative, Best Game Design, Best Innovation and Best Micro Studio. Lottie and Ak were unable to attend given that Canadian game conference Gameplay Space was happening the following day and lasting the weekend. Lottie apparently hates sleep and had to set off for this as she was giving another super funky informative talk, which we’ll get to in a bit.

So where was I…oh aye the Develop Awards. I put out a tweet asking you all to wish us luck and do questionable things to your nan. You all must have at least patted nans on the head because it all turned out pretty good on the night.

WE WON 3 AWARDS AHAHAHAHA WOOOOO YEEEEEEEEH BOI!

Disclaimer: In the interest of brand representation, I’d like to say that the collective celebratory feelings of Weather Factory may, in fact, be expressed in a more delicate humble way and the above noises are primarily coming from my own face bits.

In all seriousness, we are so happy, excited and thankful for these awards. Each winner is decided by an industry vote open to more than 4000 people who have attended Develop over the past three years. I attended the awards repping the WF crew and 3 award wins, meant 3 speeches I had to give without making geese noises and evaporating on stage due to nerves. I think they went down well. People laughed and maybe one person cried but that might have been me.

The response we got online, in person and post the awards was incredibly heartwarming. It sounds cheesy but every time we meet someone who tells us how much they love Cultist Simulator and are excited about BOOK OF HOURS, it’s such a lovely warm feeling.

I suppose you’d like to see the actual awards. Here they are in all their starry somewhat stabby sadly forever smudged glory.

What was left of Develop Conference 2019 was to ride that buzz and follow up with some more meets, wandering and then enter stasis. Well me, Ak, Hannah and Marc were able to go to our respective homes and crash. Lottie was mid-air by then and even spotted by BBC News.

She flew over with Haley who is the marketing master at Mediatonic and an all-around wonderful human. Lottie’s talk was focused on a very important aspect of games, merchandise.

As usual, her talk went down a storm and I hope she treated herself to a ton of poutine. Well not a ton but at least third helpings. At the time of writing this blog she’s been inspired by the weekend in Canada and asked you all what your ideal items and trinkets would be in your very own library. We’re getting a lot of responses to this and just wanted to note that it’s unlikely we’ll have the entire Codex Gigas as a BOOK OF HOURS reward tier Damien!

That’s a wrap the events of last week. Depending on when you read this last week was July 8th-21st. It’s back to normal now, well as normal as things can be when you’re in the world of Cultist Simulator and BOOK OF HOURS. Speaking of we’ve got those super secret special Kickstarter rewards to sort out…

If you’re reading this in June 2019, it’s Pride month which means everything gets a lot more colourful. So happy pride to all our LGBTQ+ cultists and any newcomers to the Weather Factory universe.

In our last sprint update, which you should have read as Lottie put a lot of effort into making it shiny and memetastic, you’ll see we have had quite an intense month.

We launched the Anthology Edition of Cultist Simulator alongside new DLC with Priest and Ghoul. A worldwide announcement of BOOK OF HOURS went live. Plus cat drama ensued. But that wasn’t enough to make our calendars squeak as Casual Connect hit London and I attended as part of two panels, Diversity in the Workforce and LGBT in Gaming.

For the work environment focused panel I was alongside the power force of progression Liz Prince and inclusion hero Paula Whelan. We discussed the trials and tribulations of increasing diversity in the workforce and more importantly what can be done to make getting that bread more inclusive and healthy for everyone.

“I wrote something down that I read that made absolute sense to me: Diversity is being asked to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance, and belonging is dancing like nobody’s watching” – a brilliant quote by Liz Prince.

It’s important to always keep multiple dialogues occurring regarding these subjects but we do need to start pairing actions with talking. G into Gaming is certainly an example of that. To get a more in-depth look at the topics discussed and what I had to say (which isn’t nearly as impressive as Liz and Paula’s contribution), Games Daily Biz covered the panel here.

After a quick lunch and drinking tap water from a can, because apparently, that’s the world we now live in I was on to my next panel. It was moderated by Richard Franke a game dev whose alter ego is the fabulous Kitty Powers. The main topics were, our experiences in the industry so far, how companies can create realistic LGBT characters for their games and what titles stuck with us over the years.

I was in the good company of Ed Fear from Mediatonic, PR Freelancer Izzy Jagan and Gaymingmag founder Robin Gray. We were sat beside what was essentially a magnifying glass, allowing the sun to lick our faces. It was hot you guys, so hot.

These sort of panels are useful for those in the industry looking to get advice on how to steer the creative side of gay character creation and inclusion in games. They’re also important for those within the industry, especially starting out, who need to know that there are folk to reach out to and to support them.

But the good gay times didn’t stop there, as the next morning Gayming magazine went live and I was featured in the inagural launch of the digital magazine. I gave some harsh but fair words about the issues facing diversity in the esport industry, and my career so far.

Somehow I wasn’t asked what character I had a crush on but it’s Bastila from Knights of the Old Republic or Suvi Anwar from Mass Effect. So now you know!

I once did an article about how Suvi Anwar was the first character I ever encountered that represented me in many important ways. You can read it here if you want. But essentially I never knew how important a relatable gaming character was until I encountered her, a Scottish (ok I’m Irish but it can’t be too perfect), lesbian space scientist who believes in God.

In hindsight me also saying I fancy her sounds super narcissistic but I can’t fix all the problems in the world!

To round this all off I’ll state what is probably obvious to many but helpful to reiterate for the few. No matter who you are, who you want to be or who you love, you’re very much a valid human being who deserves respect, kindness and safety. Pride month is a time of showing solidarity to members of the LGBT community, but every month should be about showing that and an abundance of empathy to everyone.

Finally, I hope you can find time to spare some empathy for me as I fully intend to send myself into a diabetic coma inhaling all the rainbow themed food I can get my hands on! I’M COMING HOME LAWD!

So March has been an exciting month which will culminate in London Game Festival kicking off the month of April.

As part of International Women’s Day and supporting women within the games industry, Splash Damage studios hosted an event focusing on career advice and culture in the workplace. Splash Damage are a great UK based studio, who recently announced they’re handling the PC version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection wooo!

The event was organised by Brand Manager Max Downton and Live Ops Manager Cinzia Musio. Then M.C’d by the lovely Senior Narrative Designer, Ayesha Khan. Ayesha was also at GDC, giving a talk entitled “Transitioning into Narrative Design from Other Disciplines“. This is pretty nifty given that our contribution to the event was partly discussing entering the games industry through indirect and unconventional means.

Lottie, as usual, gave a shiny arty gif ridden presentation, discussing her career so far and learnings that have come from the good and the bad times.

Lottie has been a producer on several extremely successful games, such as Sunless Seas, to co-founding Weather Factory (have you folks heard of this company at all?). Her insight was particularly handy for the producers, team leaders and women that keep Splash Damage booming.

Claire, as in me typing these words yet describing myself in the 3rd person like a weirdo, discussed her…my path into the gaming sector. From becoming a ruff ‘n’ tuff builder woman, to falling into marketing and honing those skills to make them applicable and useful to the world of digital interactive entertainment sports.

The final talk came from Shay Thompson, Production Runner at Attention Seekers, who honestly blew us away by free styling her talk with a whole heap of admirable inspiration and charm. We got a hot bite quote from Shay about her thoughts on the event as a whole:

“Too often we speak about wanting to improve the issue of diversity/inclusion within our industry with very little action. The folks at Splash Damage certainly went out of their way to change that. Not only did they provide us with a safe space for women on International Women’s Day but they were warm, inviting and encouraging. There was also prosecco. I hope that more companies take heed and actually listen to us, as opposed to merely paying lip service. Thanks Splash Damage!”

Shay is part of the Level Up Link team, who have an event coming up in April. You can find the details here.

So did we enjoy the Splash Damage Women in Games event? Um that’s a fricking heck yeah. These events don’t just follow a standard “talk, applaud and take a brief few queries from the audience” format. They’re inclusive and offer a space for people with genuine concerns or interest in progression, to feel comfortable to ask and to learn. Also the audience at this particular event offered great points and thoughts to us the speakers, that we took with us.

Events like these serve a great purpose and a Weather Factory Hot Take I think we can all agree on is that they should be a reoccurring element in any industry. Both externally inviting guests in and internal events, inclusive to all in the workplace, so all can feel that their status and opinions are heard. If we want to progress, we need to listen, include and apply.

Thank you again Splash Damage for hosting this and for the million bottles of prosecco. BIG SHOUT OUT TO THE PROSECCO!

Here are rough accounts of how six real people got into games writing. I’ve blurred some of the details, because I won’t get all the details right and because I don’t want you thinking these are specific things you should do and also because they will all have done a lot of things I don’t know about.

1. Got a first job as a producer at a TV channel working on educational games, made unpaid experimental text/video transmedia work in their spare time, and won an interactive fiction competition for a now defunct narrative technology platform. On the strength of their writing in that winning entry, they were offered a writing gig by a best-in-breed indie studio for what the studio thought would be a small side project but which turned out to be a hit.

2. Did a Master’s in Creative Writing, wrote Twine pieces and attended game jams, deployed hustle and energy, got a couple of small but high-profile gigs and then built up their rep from there.

3. Worked as a teacher, then as a web developer, started a narrative-focused games studio and built an online text game that made almost no money for four years and about six other projects that produced occasional gobbets of ultimately insufficient money and then in desperation, months before bankruptcy, spawned an actual video game and then suddenly made a healthy amount of money.

4. Worked as a programmer for over a decade, ran LARPs and did film work and wrote fiction on the side, picked up writing gigs and worked co-operatively with other writers until they had had earned enough cred to found a business that handles writing work for other studios.

5. Fresh out of a history degree with no published writing at all, applied for a job at a studio with a rep for narrative work; got knocked back; wrote two self-published interactive pieces to prove commitment; applied again even though there was no current role advertised; got given a trial piece that they did an insane amount of work on; did well at interview, got a permanent role at the studio.

6. Games journo who wanted to do something different, who used their proven writing skills and their relationship of trust with developers to pick up part-time or freelance writing gigs, then finally moved into games writing full time.

I realised as I was writing this that I can think of more games journalists who’ve become games writers than I can think of any single other entry route. But ‘become a games journalist to get into games writing’ is terrible advice, because if you can break into games journalism you can probably break into games writing. There’s just as much competition for jobs, you have to work just as hard, and it’s worse paid.

In fact, ‘do what one of the people in the list above did’ is also terrible advice. #1 required not only hard work and serious talent but also a couple of strokes of frankly weird luck. #2 is the closest I know to the ‘standard route’, but I have to be honest with you, it doesn’t work for a lot of people. #4 took a really long time, and the person beneath the mask of #4 is one of the hardest-working and most indefatigable people I know. #5 worked because the emails stopped just short of being pushy and their tone hit the difficult sweet spot between persistence and humility. #5 would, in many cases, get your emails marked as spam.

#3 was, of course, me. I recommend it if you enjoy the experience, while you’re pushing a one-year-old in a buggy or chairing a writers’ meeting or staring at the ceiling at 3 am, of constantly obsessively calculating the studio’s running costs in your head and working out how many months you can keep going and trying to squeeze deadlines and figure angles you aren’t equipped to figure. Sound like your thing? Go for it, but be aware your chances of making it, even after years of work, are less than 50/50. My first studio nearly went bust at least twice, before we cracked open the bottled lightning. And that’s why when someone says ‘but how did you get started?’ my answer is invariably ‘don’t do what I did.’

Okay, Kennedy. How exactly does this help?

Here’s my advice. The one weird trick is to find a weird trick. Games writing is a competitive field. That means that most people who try to make it won’t make it.
I don’t want to over-dramatise this. There are even harder fields to make it in: I think it’s harder to become a full-time film director or actor or novelist. But that’s what competitive means: not ‘most people will have to work hard’ but ‘most people will end up doing something else.’

So you need an advantage. Preferably several. An uncle who works for Nintendo, or enough money to live off while you make your reputation, is great, but most of us don’t have those. Talent? Hard work? Those aren’t advantages, they’re entry requirements. Exceptional talent is an advantage. Experience is an advantage. Suitable talent or suitable experience is a significant advantage. If a studio is hiring for a horror game set in the Antarctic, and you can say ‘I have a PhD in Really Cold Stuff’ or ‘I wrote this game jam piece about being cold’ or ‘I was a camera operator on The Terror‘ maybe that’s enough to get your CV to the top of the pile.

So you want to do as many different interesting things as possible. Take unusual work opportunities, do creative things on the side, seek out creative works you wouldn’t normally look at. This has several other advantages. One is, hey, you’ll be doing interesting different things, and your life will be better, and when you’re dying you’ll look back at your life and think, boy, I never made it as a games writer but I’m glad I did all that stuff, PS it’s a shame the atmosphere is on fire here in 2080. Another is, you might stumble on something else you want to do. For nearly half my life I thought I wanted to be a novelist, not a games writer. And the third thing is that variety of experience makes you a better writer.

(It shouldn’t need saying, but not everyone’s got the memo, so here’s what you don’t want to do: dick over other writers. Other writers are the competition, sure, but they’re also the community. Being honourable and helpful is an advantage in its own right. What goes around comes around. It’s not always easy: we writers are an envious tribe. But it pays off in the long run.)

The people in those six stories did different, interesting things. I’m pretty sure, because of the kind of people they are, that they did a lot of things I don’t even know about. I will probably bump into one of them at GDC and they’ll say ‘nice piece but you didn’t mention the years I spent as a a particle physicist.’ All of them tried lots of different things, and eventually one of those things stuck.

This is much less specific than the usual advice. If you Google ‘getting started in games writing’ you’ll find a lot of that advice. I’ve given it myself, so I won’t repeat it here. It’s not bad advice. But the important thing is that it’s what everyone else is doing. If you do exactly what they’re doing, you won’t have an advantage. Remember what ‘competitive field’ means.

So follow the usual advice. You need to do all those things to make it. But you need to do something else, probably actually somethings elses, too. It’s up to you to work out what that is. Find the road less travelled.

Some final bad news, good news.

Final bad news: if you are faced, right now, with getting up and going into work every day at a dull job, and coming home and writing in the evenings and then going to bed not too late so you can get up and go into work again, there is probably nothing you can do today that will mean that next week, you can get up and get paid for writing instead.

Final good news: there are lots and lots of things you can do that mean that next year or the year after you can suddenly look back over the road you’ve travelled and find you have a job, writing, in games. But only if you start trying to find those things today. Good luck.

There’s more. The $77 reward says ‘don’t select this tier; it is full of snakes’. You advance your astronaut’s potential by putting them on game shows. The trailer is narrated by an urbane mandala lion. But the whole thing is polished – they’ve really committed. It’s not just a silly gag, or rather, it’s a mountain of silly gags lovingly crafted into a spear of alarming satire and phantasmagoric psychedelia, with an actual demo and some surprisingly sane game design.

As I write, ATB has 10 hours to go and needs another nine thousand dollars. They’re only asking for 26K, and they had a strong start, but I think people are just glancing at the page and going ‘huh’? The tragic thing is that my old studio, Failbetter, has offered to match-fund them if they raise the money from Kickstarter – so backers are effectively getting double production value from each pledge, but the whole thing will fall through if the KS doesn’t make it. And they’ve been working on it for two years.

(Disclaimer: I have 0% financial interest in Failbetter these days, and 0% financial interest in ATB)

Here is the link to their Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/uhm/astronaut-the-best/description

Here is the RPS post, where Adam Smith as usual Gets It. The video on that page explains the game much better than their main KS video.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/10/17/astronaut-the-best-kickstarter/

And here’s their demo.

http://astronautthebest.com/play

I’ve just upped my pledge to $200, despite bloody Brexit making that an aggravatingly large number of Queen Pounds, because I reckon we need more games like this. You can help too by pledging or spreading the word.

Open Sorcery, from Abigail Corfman, is a mobile-app-wrapped Twine game where you play a sentient magical defence system.

Twine was built to support branching narratives.Classic branching narratives without any game-hybrid elements are a bundle of special-case IF/ELSE forks. These have advantages and disadvantages. They’re very straightforward for the player to understand, very easy to start building, fiddly to debug, difficult to scale. And they’re more like a guided tour than an exploration on foot. What if you want to revisit an early choice or progress at your own pace? You can’t. That’s not in the tour.

And that’s fine. Twine has created a huge and varied ecosystem of games by lowering the barrier to entry. Building a story with a more general set of rules is a much (sometimes much, much) more expensive endeavour, and generally offers less variety of experience. But I do enjoy games that leverage their mechanics to create a narrative effect, rather than hard-coding the whole narrative.

Open Sorcery is one of the minority of Twine games with an honest-to-goodness core loop. Your protag is charged with patrolling four locations each day and each night, scanning for menaces, and dealing with them. When a scan shows up menaces, there’s a simple exercise where you need to identify from the text descriptions what aspects (Order, Fire, Light, Fear…) the menace possesses. It’s not difficult, but it steps your brain up a gear, it suits the world-building, and it provides a reliable routine that serves as a game mechanic.

That mechanic serves as a means to explicate your character, and for you to express your character back. The repeated visits to the locations make them feel like places in a consistent world, not just paragraphs you pass through.

Android version here, Apple version here, web demo here.

The Fall is a side-scrolling point-and-click adventure from indie studio Over the Moon. You play the onboard intelligence of a power armour suit with an unconscious passenger, exploring a derelict installation populated by deranged machine intelligences.

The Fall’s robots are TV scifi. You know: they talk in even, contraction-free tones. They all but say things like ‘that is illogical’. But they also use euphemisms like ‘depurpose’, and their drives and limitations feel like those of smart machines, not people. A major third act plot point revolves around the protagonist’s inability to lie. If you’re going to make your NPCs unhuman, make them feel unhuman: the Fall did this. It’s partly in the writing, partly in the voice acting, and it rises like smoke from the visual design.

[I should warn you that the Fall ends on a cliffhanger, and the sequel’s not out yet (they’re saying Q1 2017). But the whole game worked, narratively, as far as I was concerned.]