There is never any escape from Christmas. So you might as well embrace this year’s edition of the BOOK OF HOURS advent calendar!

What is this so-called advent calendar?

It’s a set of small daily Secret Histories treats, because we love Christmas. You can redeem each item every day either in BOOK OF HOURS or in the real world. The calendar runs from 1st – 25th December.

What’s *in* the advent calendar?

A mix of in-game items and little real-world treats. We’ll announce what’s behind every day’s door at noon on our social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), and update this post with a megalist of everything released so far.

How do I get it?

Make sure you have the latest version (2024.12.m.3) on Steam and/or GOG. You’ll see Christmas decorations appear throughout Hush House when in-game winter rolls around, and will be able to redeem any in-game gifts from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree next to his Rectory in Brancrug Village.

Please note: you can’t get advent calendar gifts during spring, summer or autumn. You have to wait for in-game winter to appear (or start in winter) to receive any in-game items. When playing at x6 speed, the longest you’ll have to wait is a maximum of ~6 minutes.

What if I miss a day?

Any in-game items will remain available on Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree until midnight on New Year’s Eve. The advent calendar ‘ends’ on Christmas Day, but you have an extra week to collect any missed items after then!

Real-world gifts are either only usable on that day, or will be available in perpetuity. Check the megalist of advent gifts below to see what they are (or were).

What if I *hate* it?

You can turn off any and all seasonal art in the Settings menu. Sob.

The advent calendar megalist

• Sunday 1st — [IN-GAME] Christmas decorations! These appear in several places in Hush House, as well as across Brancrug Village. Also, Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree appears. 🎄
  
  
• Monday 2nd — [IN-GAME] Something smooth as an egg and frosted like a winter window. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Tuesday 3rd — [REAL WORLD] 50% off the Notebook of the Hours, in single and bundle form. For 24hrs only!
  
  
• Wednesday 4th — [IN-GAME] Something fiendishly simple and wretchedly fragile. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Thursday 5th — [REAL WORLD] Announcing a live AMA with Alexis and Lottie on Friday 13th December on the Weather Factory subreddit. Something may arrive.
  
  
• Friday 6th — [IN-GAME] Something hard for mortal men to dig. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Saturday 7th — [REAL WORLD] 50% off The Lady Afterwards, the luxury Cultist Simulator TRPG. For 24hrs only!
  
  
• Sunday 8th — [IN-GAME] Something salty and savoury. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Monday 9th — [REAL WORLD] New Lucid Tarot in the shop! It’s the last batch before Christmas, and ships worldwide.
  
  
• Tuesday 10th — [IN-GAME] Something healthful and slippery. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Wednesday 11th — ???
  
  
• Thursday 12th — ???
  
  
• Friday 13th — ???
  
  
• Saturday 14th — ???
  
  
• Sunday 15th — ???
  
  
• Monday 16th — ???
  
  
• Tuesday 17th — ???
  
  
• Wednesday 18th — ???
  
  
• Thursday 19th — ???
  
  
• Friday 20th — ???
  
  
• Saturday 21st — ???
  
  
• Sunday 22nd — ???
  
  
• Monday 23rd — ???
  
  
• Tuesday 24th — ???
  
  
• Wednesday 25th — ???

We’ve been a bit quiet recently, but we haven’t been idle! Today is a long-awaited LAUNCH DAY, but it’s also a good time to update everyone on what we’ve been up to. First up:

✨ The Lucid Tarot is out now! ✨

The first 500 decks of the Lucid Tarot are now available on the Etsy shop. They’re unique collectors’ decks because they come with a signed certificate of authenticity along with their embroidered velvet tarot bag and quick start guide to reading the cards. If you’d like one, get in quick! We expect them to go pretty fast.

To remind you, these cards are a reimagining of Secret Histories lore (you’ll see Hours represented in new ways to highlight parts of them we didn’t foreground in the Tarot of the Hours, e.g.) and inspired by the otherworldly beauty of stained-glass windows. The Major Arcana features all Hours from the Moth to the enigmatic twenty-first Hour sometimes called ‘Giribrago’, but with traditional Rider-Waite names (‘The Fool’; ‘The World’) rather than their Secret Histories counterparts.

I’ve also tried to reflect the Rider-Waite symbology more clearly in the Minor Arcana, but with familiar skills and companions from BOOK OF HOURS. You’ll find Arun Peel the Knight of Pentacles, for instance, or Wolf Stories the Seven of Swords. I hope this adds new meaning on top of the gorgeously rich Rider-Waite deck, as well as giving you a good game of Hey, I Recognise That Thing From Somewhere Else! Anyway, I’m very happy where it’s all ended up, especially considering how derpy some of the original drawings are:

Forgive me, Elegiast.

If anyone misses out on a deck, don’t worry. We’ll be relisting another batch of ~400+ tarots this year, as soon as we can facilitate it. Christmas is coming, after all. I just need time to manage the backlog of orders. I don’t think I could ship 1,000 decks without turning into A Poor Lunatic.

Thank you extremely much for being patient with me while this project went on and on and on. If I make another deck for Game Three, maybe I won’t try to engineer an entirely new way to make cards before I can distribute them? Just a thought, Lottie. Just a thought.

A voice from the other side

AK here. It still tickles me how few people realise Weather Factory is literally just two people (plus, ofc, trusted freelancers). I answer support emails every week addressed to ‘Dear Support Team’. We get speculative applications from people who want to intern with us and don’t realise we work out of a flat. Microstudios composed of couples are more common than they used to be, but it’s still mildly unusual. We like it, but it does make it harder to take holidays, and it does mean we don’t hire.

I mentioned recently that we’ve been working on BOOK OF HOURS, on and off, for five years now. Some of that was pre-production, some of that was the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, but it’s a long old time. A undergraduate degree and a master’s degree. A newborn infant grown enough to go to school. If you planted an apple pip five years ago, you could be eating its fruit today.

Or to put it another way, I was 47 when we started making BH and I’m 52 now. And it occurred to me that I’ve made about four games over fifteen years, and in another fifteen years I’ll be 67. So Lottie and I had a chat about whether and how we want to spend the next fifteen years doing this – both making games, and making games as a microstudio with just the two of us.

If you like our games, you’ll be glad to hear that the answer is, broadly speaking, yes. Maybe we’ll do more physical goods, maybe I’ll take a couple of years out for that MA I keep threatening, but we like working together and we like the artisanal nature of the whole thing. I don’t actually get up on a Monday and think, yay, support mails, Lottie doesn’t get excited about answering Etsy merch queries, but we do like handling this stuff personally: the people who own the company and make the games are the same people you’re talking to. It also stops us from getting too up ourselves.

We’ve talked about Weather Factory being a bit like a band or an artistic partnership but most days it feels more like a family-run cafe that happens to sell coffee through Steam.

And we like making things for you lot – for our audience, I mean. I said as long ago as Fallen London that there is something to be said for making games that work like reading comprehension tests. It brings in a calmer class of customer.

We’ve got ideas, then, for at least another couple of games before we turn in our Dev Guild hat feathers and go off to roast coffee in the hills. Over to Lottie to talk about the next one.

What now? 

We’re still working on BOOK OF HOURS localisation (in case you missed it, HOUSE OF LIGHT’s now fully playable in Simplified Chinese) and various important but not terribly scintillating tech and bug support issues. But as AK says above, we took some time to take stock of where the studio is and what we want to do next. We’ve decided that, while we might come back to BOOK OF HOURS later, we’ve said what we wanted to say with it through HOUSE OF LIGHT. We’d like to leave it there – for now.

Currently, we’re Fascinated by an idea for Game Three. We’ve spent some of the past couple of months prototyping the underlying tech system and art direction so we can share something that’s reasonably likely to look like the final game. We need to do a bit more work before we can announce, but here are some tidbits we can share:

• • • The game is set in the Secret Histories… but another decade on. The world has changed and keeps on changing.

    • It may appeal to AK’s older audiences – from Fallen London and Sunless Sea – as well as Weather Factory fans.

    • It’s a new genre we haven’t developed before. It’s a natural fit for the kind of stuff we do, though.

    • It’s ambitious. And…

    • …who’s this?

It’s finally here! HOUSE OF LIGHT is now available on Steam and GOG – don’t keep reading this! Go play it! That honey-haunted pumpkin pie ain’t gonna bake itself!

Play on Steam   //   Play on GOG

HOUSE OF LIGHT adds a novel’s worth of content to BOOK OF HOURS. It’s free to anyone with Perpetual Edition and 10% off for everyone in the first week of sale. It’s also purchasable as a new Anthology Edition bundle (including BOOK OF HOURS, HOUSE OF LIGHT and the soundtrack) all with an extra 15% off everything – just like the Anthology Edition of Cultist Simulator. This is the best value and most definitive version of the game you can buy.

Once purchased (or if you’re a PE owner, once you update to the latest version of the game), you should see a new HOUSE OF LIGHT button on the bottom left-hand corner of the main menu screen. Clicking it will open a ‘spoiler-light’ introduction to the new content (and how to get it) in-game, but I’ll reproduce it here to whet your appetite:

FOOD

Combine Ingredients, Sustenance, and Kitchenware items at the three Kitchen workstations to create nearly a hundred new dishes. TIP: The Spice Scales, and the Spices & Savours skill, will substitute for each other.

A WRITING-CASE

Once you’ve received this gift, you can record addresses from the calling-cards left by satisfied visitors; and write to these visitors to invite them back to the House. TIP: Visitors don’t arrive instantly; visitors don’t leave calling cards until you’ve helped them; and some visitors are easier to summon than others.

SALONS

Place food and drink in one of the six Salon rooms, and then use the bell to begin a Salon. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with sparkling conversation… and Lessons. TIP: Visitors usually prefer food and drink which matches their primary Interest, but some have additional requirements.

MANUSCRIPTS

Use Paper, Ink, and a Skill to write a Manuscript based on that skill. These Manuscripts may be necessary to satisfy thirsts for specific knowledge in FURTHER STORIES. Lessons from Salons will help you improve those Skills and write more useful Manuscripts. TIP: You can’t reliably control what Visitors will discuss – it’s a party, not an interrogation – but they’ll usually provide lessons related to their shared Interests.

FURTHER STORIES

Once you’ve completed an Incident, follow it up in the Tree of Wisdoms. Visitors will need more specific help here – perhaps a book on a specific topic, or a specific book. TIP: An Affair opens to Further Stories once all interested Visitors have had the opportunity to ask you for help with it. Be aware in some Further Stories, it can make a difference who you originally helped. Be careful. This is the one part of the game where choices can sometimes have permanent consequences.

THE INSTITUTE

Look for the lighthouse, out at sea. When your Visitors are ready, use it to establish the true heirs to the Curia of the Isle. TIP: Further Stories outcomes can inspire your Visitors to support the Institute – for their own reasons. Their nature is constant, but some story outcomes can make them decide to emphasise one agenda over another.

Please leave a review if you like it 

Recent events have made us even more aware of the fragility of Steam review scores – and how important they are to our ability to do our jobs. So if you like HOUSE OF LIGHT, please leave it a positive review! People tend not to leave reviews for expansions / DLC, but you might be the thing standing between us and a Dreadful Red rating for this sweet, polished bit of content about hosting friends for tea. So if you can, please give us a nice blue thumbs up! ✨👍✨

Excuse me this expansion appears to be only in English

HOUSE OF LIGHT is currently being translated into Russian and Simplified Chinese, to match the tip-top localisations of the base game. Please be patient with us while our wonderful localisers complete their work. We expect to launch the Simplified Chinese beta next week, though – so it shouldn’t be too long before we have full translations ready to go.

Japanese is coming for the full game and the beta ASAP. More news on that when we have confirmed dates.

We’re still considering translating BOOK OF HOURS into other languages. We’ll let everyone know if we decide to go ahead with any additional localisations, just as soon as they’re confirmed in studio.

Anything else?

Everyone’s favourite Canadian (OK, after Benton Fraser from Due South), Systemchalk, is livestreaming BOOK OF HOURS on the Steam page right now. If you’d like to experience the sensation of pouring warm maple syrup into your ear while you drowse by a library fireplace, tune in.

Also, all our merch is currently 25% off in the shop to celebrate HOUSE OF LIGHT’s launch, so go nuts with all the things you’ve had your eye on but were cannily waiting for a good deal (here’s looking at you, Lady Afterwards).

Fingers crossed you enjoy all the love we put into HOUSE OF LIGHT. Thanks so much for playing, and happy hosting in Hush House!

— Mervyn Bunter, Clouds of Witness (1926)

Facts are the bricks of life, but they need a few licks of paint before you want to look at them. Mr Gradgrind of Hard Times said: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” And he turned out to be the villain of the piece! So today I am giving you facts, but coated in glorious technicolour.

HOUSE OF LIGHT

You all know that HOUSE OF LIGHT is launching on Steam and GOG on Thursday 26th September at 6PM BST. I can now confirm that it will cost $14.99 / £12.99 / €13.99 with a 10% launch discount in the first week of sale (except if you’re a Perpetual Edition owner, in which case it’s free). We’ll also be adding a new BOOK OF HOURS: Anthology Edition bundle, just like Cultist Simulator, which includes the base game, the soundtrack and HOUSE OF LIGHT with a 15%-off-everything discount (making it about $43.32 / £35.67 / €41.21 in total). This should make it easy for first-time buyers to get the definitive edition of the game with one click, and for existing fans to force gentle occult librarianship on all their friends by buying it as a gift for someone else.

AK has already mentioned this in a few places, but it’s worth reiterating that HOUSE OF LIGHT is roughly comparable in size to all Cultist‘s DLCs wrapped up in one. Cultist had lots of smaller expansions, but we tried something different with BOOK OF HOURS and spent much longer making one really chunky expansion rather than lots of little pieces. So just in case anyone was worried about the value of Perpetual Edition dropping, it hasn’t! It’s all just coming at once this time.

Depending on how HOUSE OF LIGHT goes, and how pre-production on our Mysterious Game Three goes, we’ll make a decision in the first half of 2025 about whether we come back to BOOK OF HOURS and release additional expansions like HOUSE OF HUES. More on that as/when we have updates.

Now, for some long-awaited news…

The Lucid Tarot

It finally has a release date! That release date is:

🎴🎃🦇 HALLOWEEN 🦇🎃🎴

(Thursday 31st October 2024)

We’ll be releasing it on our Etsy shop at 6PM GMT, it’ll cost £70 + shipping, and we’ll be starting with 500 signed, limited edition copies. Every deck comes with a velvet tarot bag and quick start guide, but the first 500 decks will also contain a certificate of authenticity, signed and numbered by ‘the artist’. Once these are gone, they’re gone – so if the Tarot of the Hours and the Lady Afterwards launches are anything to go by, I’d suggest camping out on the Etsy shop at this time on Halloween and grabbing a copy while they’re still there.

If you miss out on the first 500, don’t worry. Like we did with the Tarot of the Hours – to make sure everyone in all time zones had a fair chance of getting a deck – we’ll release another 500 Lucid Tarots over November / December. If we sell out, we’ll restock for 2025. So everyone who wants a deck will be able to get one – we just have to take it slow so I (and my mum and dad, who have been unceremoniously roped in for packing duty) can manage demand.

Right. See you on the other side of Simplified Chinese and Russian release, which is happening next week on Thursday 29th August. Wish us luck!

• Grand prize: August MK
• Runners-up: Kristen B, Christopher G, Anthony H, Cat, Jason M
• Wildcards: Will E, Paul H, Elegiant, Andrew H, Julián, Matthew L, Sebastian-Benjamin T, Marco I, Agahnim, Matt F

All winners have been emailed. Thanks to all who entered, and if you didn’t win, better luck next time! At least Cthulhu hasn’t woken up. We think.

H. P. Lovecraft was the godfather of ‘weird fiction’ and a major influence on Cultist Simulator. He was also born on 20th August 1890, so we’re running a Lovecraftian giveaway from today until his birthday on 20th August 2024 when you can win some suitably eldritch prizes! Enter (as many times as you like) below…

The Prizes

GRAND PRIZE: The Lady Afterwards TRPG

“You’ve been summoned to Alexandria, a city of coloured lights and curious histories. An old friend needs you to track down a woman. She’s probably in trouble. Probably trouble herself. Plus ça change…”

The Lady Afterwards is a Cultist Simulator TRPG for 2-8 players set in 1920s Alexandria. It takes place in the world of the Secret Histories, where hidden gods watch over a world of apocalypse, yearning and forbidden arts. It’s a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express. Everything you need is included: gamebooks, clues, character sheets, dice sets and more. More info and images available here.

5 x RUNNERS-UP: The Tarot of the Hours

“Do the Hours speak? If they do, this may be the language they use.”

Five runners-up will get one of our bestselling Tarot of the Hours decks. Based off the traditional Rider-Waite tarot, the Tarot of the Hours uses the esoteric full-colour art of Cultist Simulator on every card and packages it up in a matt laminated tuck box. You can see more of the deck here.

10 x WILDCARDS: Cultist Simulator (Steam or GOG)

“Seize forbidden treasures. Summon alien gods. Feed on your disciples.”

You like Lovecraft? Then you’ll probably like Cultist Simulator. Described as the single best video game at evincing Lovecraftian horror, Cultist Sim is a double BAFTA-nominated roguelike narrative card game where you start your own cult, glean snippets of the occult from the House Without Walls, and try your best not to die. 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

FAQ

When do entries close?

At noon on Tuesday 20th August 2024.

When will the winners be announced?

On the afternoon of Tuesday 20th August 2024. You’ll be contacted directly if you win, and we’ll announce winners on all our social channels too.

Can I enter multiple times?

Yes! There are a maximum of five ways to enter: following us on our Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and/or sharing the giveaway on Twitter and Facebook. Each one of those actions counts as separate entries, so you could just do one of them and give yourself one chance of winning a prize, or you could do all five of them and give yourself five chances of winning something. Simples!

I don’t have social media! Can I enter some other way?

We added YouTube to the list this year to help with this! But I’m afraid if you don’t have any social media OR a YouTube account, we can’t add you in to the giveaway. 🙁 You can always check out our merch shop instead, though!

Please tell me legal stuff so you don’t get sued

We’re running this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, but it’s not sponsored, endorsed, administered by or associated with any of those companies.

Still have questions?

Just email us. 🙂

OK, this quote from Cultist Simulator is possibly one of the grimmest things AK ever wrote in the game (the ‘Marinette ending’ from The Dancer DLC. IYKYK). But I am repurposing it to herald to a good thing and that good thing is some secret Cultist Simulator news! Namely:

Cultist Simulator… on console?!

Screenshots from the PlayStation dev kit

This is not a drill! Cultist Simulator is coming to Xbox and Playstation on 8th August 2024.  We partnered with Polish publishers Klabater because a) they clearly know what’s what and b) we love the Poles. (I used to date one and AK used to live there. One winter’s day his hair literally froze into icicles.)

Cultist Simulator‘s console UI is heavily based on Playdigious’s excellent rework for the Nintendo Switch, which we think is the best way to transform a fundamentally clicky PC-first game to a controller-friendly game. So here are the key details to know:

• Launch date: Thursday 8th August 2024
• Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
• Versions and prices:
  • Initiate Edition (game plus mini DLC: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLC) – $24.99 / €24.99
  • The Exile DLC – $9.99 / €9.99
  • Anthology Edition (everything together: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC) – $29.99 / €29.99

Wishlist the game today if you’re interested! Click to wishlist on….

Perhaps some people reading this have had enough of being nice and homey in BOOK OF HOURS and want to start a new run of hubristic Lovecraftian fun. Maybe you want to go through the game to find something AK wrote that’s even more upsetting than Marinette’s story. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world. Whatever your motivation, I hope you pick Cultist Simulator up on your platform of choice next month. It’s the first time we’ve ever released any game on console (including any of our work on Fallen London or Sunless Sea) so we are excited! Excite alongside us, if you like.

Where in a month of Sundays is the Lucid Tarot?

Click for larger versions.

It has taken a preposterously long time to make this a reality. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but some highlights include £44,000 quotes from local suppliers, another supplier running off with our money, and having to come up with an entirely new production process for printing double-sided opaque-but-also-transparent tarot cards. I literally couldn’t find anyone who’d made cards like this before, anywhere in the world. I even tried to contact the people who made the Gloom deck – one of the key inspirations – but no dice. Fortunately, I found a wonderful factory producer and we’re now on our sixth or seventh iteration of the deck. To give you an idea of the problems encountered, here’s a comparison of the first prototype we produced (which I loved) with the first production-ready deck:

The production-ready deck is smooth and scratch resistant and gorgeously made. But the production process significantly darkened the deck from the prototype (which was a manual, not production-viable first pass).

You might think the difference isn’t terribly significant – you might actually prefer the darker version – but problems became particularly apparent when you held the cards up to the light:

Bearing in mind the whole point of the deck is for them to be actually usable as tarot cards – so you can place them face down and then reveal them – this really wasn’t cricket. But thanks to brilliant work from Emma, my contact at the factory, we’ve now come up with a totally new method which involves printing multiple middle-levels of white ink and then splicing those layers with a layer of iridescent ink. This necessitates using specialist ink and materials I hadn’t heard of, but now we have nice opaque cards which also have gently silvered iridescent edges (this is the version featured in the gallery at the top of this section). I love them! There are some minor imperfections – I think they add charm, Emma thinks they can be improved upon – so we’re trying one last improvement before greenlighting full production. As a result, I still can’t confirm a specific release date yet, but I can at least tell you we are very close, and have an MVP (minimum viable product) as a beautiful worst-case fallback.

I appreciate that from the outside it all probably looks like this:

BUT TRUST ME! People are excited about the deck, it’s been a much more complex physical production process than expected, and I don’t want to sell anything I can’t enthusastically and truthfully endorse. Here’s what I can confirm at this stage:

• The Lucid Tarot is almost certainly launching on our Etsy shop this year
• We’ll offer an initial, limited run of 500 signed and numbered decks which will come with a signed certificate of authenticity
• We’ll then move to staggered runs of 100 (or so!) of unnumbered decks, so people in different time zones have a fair chance or getting them when they go on sale
• Every deck – both the 500 limited edition and the unnumbered version – comes swaddled in a rich velvet tarot bag and ‘quick read’ summary of each card’s meaning, so you can get strated tout suite.

BOOK OF HOURS

[MAJOR HOUSE OF LIGHT SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT]

AK is away currently on a mysterious writing trip – his last before HOUSE OF LIGHT launches – to finish up the Lighthouse Institute. You’ve probably noticed that our teasers up until this point about the Lighthouse Institute have been, er, here is a lighthouse! Here are some aspects! Be excited! Well, soon we will have some more specifics to share. People in the HOUSE OF LIGHT beta seem to really enjoy the interactions between visitors – for example, surprising revelations about the hobbies of well-known occultists:

“Douglas and Serena discuss a shared, concealed, but evidently profound passion for knitting. Douglas: ‘If you tell anyone outside this room, I’ll have you locked up.’ Serena: ‘If you tell anyone outside this room, I’ll give King Crucible your address.'”

Or subtle yet pivotal decisions in other occultists’ lives:

“Morgen and Arun return to their conversation about the Obliviates, who once were called the House of Lethe. She playfully accuses him of being a member, and asks him where he keeps his three chains. He parries by asking her where she keeps her notorious key of black sapphire. Morgen crosses her legs and asks Arun silkily if he would like to search her. After a moment, he says very definitely that no, he would not.”

AK is writing even more to cover the most likely potential outcomes of the Lighthouse board. As there are six positions available and 1-3 people (I think!) who are eligible for that position, there’re a lot of different possibilities here. It’s actually a great illustration of the danger of hidden multipliers in game development. To take an art pipeline example: ‘I will add two vases of flowers to each room in Hush House, which will take 5 minutes each. That’s quick! OK, so there are 107 rooms, multiplied by 10 minutes, which gives me a task list that will take… realistically three full days’ work to complete. Maybe I won’t add those flowers then.’ This is why AK has to basically rent a room and lock himself inside it when it comes to these big writing tasks in BOOK OF HOURS. It’s on us for making such a complicated, baroque game, but hey!

What I can share at this stage is that AK is doing a lot of work on endings, making them truly reflective of your choices and your specific Lighthouse Board. Here’s our new Lighthouse-specific ending page, for example (please note this is a mock-up, and may change before we launch):

You’ll be able to click on each of the Lighthouse Institute roles (‘Secretary Vigilant’, etc) to see what that specific person did in that specific role, or whether they’re still sulking because the Institute decided to be friends with the bug people instead of the year wranglers. So you should have a really good sense at the end of a HOUSE OF LIGHT playthrough of the effect your choices had on the world, and what the personalities you put in power went on to achieve. Hopefully that will feel crunchy and rewarding, like a fresh slice of Amber Pumpkin Pie. But more news on this soon, when AK returns!

“Celebrating the completion of the Further Visitor Stories in HOUSE OF LIGHT. That means we’re at 80% done, which means in turn that I should be sending out a handful of beta keys to the lucky few end of next week (sorry, if you haven’t already heard, you didn’t get your name drawn from the Clutches). HOUSE OF LIGHT is a chonker: already the same word count that the whole of Cultist Simulator was at launch.”

So that means we hope you’ll really like HOUSE OF LIGHT, and we should have a suitably chonky blog post with updates for you soon!

In the meantime, we’re also trying something new. We’ve just uploaded the first episode of what we hope will become a fortnightly communal attempt to predict the future! This is the Weather Forecast. This is the Weather Forecast. We love games – you love games too, probably. We talk about games all the time – you have actual lives, and maybe only talk about games a bit. So we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain on professional game development and take a look at the week’s top ten most popular upcoming games on Steam. Using publicly accessible data and a bit of Google-fu, we then each try to estimate that game’s Week 1 review score, which is a general indicator of a game’s ‘success’ at launch. One developer’s success criterion is different from another’s, of course – a first-time solo dev could be rightfully delighted by 50 reviews in the first week, but 50 reviews in the first week for an Electronic Arts launch would probably cause heads to roll. So this isn’t about judging games as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ – it’s about seeing whether we can reliably predict the fortunes of a game just before launch, because that would be really useful for all our future Weather Factory games. And we happen to think it’s pretty interesting, too.

So take a look at the first episode, join in with a YouTube comment if you like, and come back in a fortnight for us to see if we got any of the numbers right!

A few things to note:

1. 1. All data we’re using is publicly available. We don’t have any insider knowledge, other than experience making games ourselves!
   2. The ‘Popular Upcoming’ list on Steam is region-specific, so if you’re not in the UK you may see a different list. There are loads of games in ‘Popular Upcoming’ that are never mentioned by traditional games press or streamers. Hopefully you’ll discover some games you’ve never heard of that you actually quite fancy playing.
   3. We’d love you to join in if you’d like to. If you want to guess any Week 1 review numbers, just leave a comment on the video. You can be smug in the next video when we recap what actually happened against our predicted numbers.
   4. This isn’t a value judgement on any of the featured games. We’re just looking at data and talking about what it might mean.

Good luck to all games mentioned! We hope your launches – which are by far the scariest part of game dev – go brilliantly.

Now, I leave you with news that Cultist Simulator is today’s Daily Deal on Steam, at a deepest-ever (and frankly insane) 75% off. Check it out, and watch the ever-marvellous Systemchalk Broadcasting live on the store page now. Oh! And all our merch is 25% off for the weekend, to celebrate Cultist being culty and the Weather Forecast probably being embarrassingly wrong. Happy Friday, everyone!

“…There are, however, exceptions.” It’s Cultist Simulator‘s sixth birthday today, so let’s make an exception for her. This quote is from a high-level Secret Histories fragment called ‘Unresolved Ambiguity’, and it could absolutely be a metaphor for game development in general. Cultist could have been a hundred different games, but it ended up consolidated in the one it became (and the one it evolved into, after years of post-lauch DLC and updates). You may remember that we made Cultist Simulator in 11 months, with a budget of around £150,000. It’s now reached somewhere between 850,000 to a million people, making some serious allowances for chaotic data like Humble Bundles and Amazon Prime. So in honour of her birthday here’s a whirlwind tour of just under a year’s game development, starting with the most important part of all: the What Even Is This Javascript Greybox Prototype. (Click for larger images!)

People who’ve played Cultist Simulator will recognise a surprising amount in these early prototypes. The art direction isn’t there – AK is definitely theme and mechanics first, ‘colours’ second – but the game’s Cookie Clicker influence is particularly apparent, as are important other factes of the final game like verbs (Study, Dream, Work…), timers (45s countdown for ‘The body has its needs…’) and resource-based storytelling (Secret Histories 1 + Occult Scrap 1 = Recruit an Aficionado of Conspiracies). I’ve worked with AK since 2015, when we met at his previous studio, and he always has a weirdly clear idea of what the game will be at the start. It’s just difficult for him to explain it and for anyone else to see inside his head. I’m now well-versed in the two to six months of trust where I have no idea what this game is that we’re apparently making, before it all falls into place. That moment for Cultist was this updated prototype, where you could first see the basic card interface:

I get it now! I see what all those grey buttons on their grey backgrounds represented! This gives me a lot to work with – I can now see what needs to be artified – while being flexible enough for AK to still be able to play with basic mechanics and the all-important recipes at the heart of the final game. Looks recognisable now, right? But where it really comes to life is when AK and Catherine Unger, our brilliant freelance artist, settled on a suitable art style:

It now looks so much like the real Cultist Simulator, but with enough difference, to trigger a bit of sense of the uncanny valley. I still mourn those stick-timers on the verb tokens, for instance! But this was where people really started to sit up and take notice of the game we were about four months out from completing. So with a bunch of hard game dev, which looks in real terms like this…

…Cultist Simulator, as we know and love her, was born. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GAME ABOUT PEELING BACK THE SKIN OF THE WORLD! We really love you.

Over to AK, and the expansion he’s been focused on.

HOUSE OF LIGHT melds with the existing game like the Witch-Twin or half a diphthong. So we’re taking the unusual step of adding actual meta information to the menu when you buy it:

Squint and you might notice an incongruous presence behind the window. The HOUSE OF LIGHT menu icon won’t actually be a tiny photo of the Tourlitis lighthouse – that was just a reference I gave Lottie for art. Similarly, any and all of the text in this window might change. But this is roughly how the expansion is shaping up, and you can see now some more of what I meant by ‘the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone’.

There are probably just two bullet points yet unilluminated: FURTHER STORIES and LIGHTHOUSE INSTITUTE. These are at least 30% of the expansion, though. FURTHER STORIES is ‘what happens in each of the non-Numa visitor stories’ . Why just the non-Numa stories? Because Numa visitors were really hard to fit into the other points (FOOD, SALONS, etc) above. Does Coseley have an address? Is Bancroft actually alive? Can you invite Aunt Mopsy to dinner? I know that when I say ‘no’ to that last one there’ll be a chorus of AW NO FUN, but I’m saving you from yourselves. Anyway there are a couple of dozen of even the non-Numa stories, so adding even a modest bit of variant-outcome (‘branching’ if you want to use That Word) to each of them is quite a lot of work.

BOOK OF HOURS is 100%* backwards-compatible with existing saves. That * means ‘it’s a bug if it’s not’. This also means that to some limited extent your choices about who you helped and who you didn’t will carry over – for example, if you helped Coquille or Zachary with the Messenger’s Casket then its occupant is loose, if you helped Dagmar then its occupant is locked up tight, and if you helped both sides then the seals are cracking. Again, the branching variant-outcome effect is quite gentle, not least because I calibrated most of the original visitor stories so that you could conceivably help several people and never know the difference. But just this once I had the foresight to track effects for the future. So that’ll make a difference, at least for the 3% of players who both buy HOUSE OF LIGHT and don’t immediately begin a new run.

The Further Stories work is most of what’s left to do on House of Light, along with the coda which the Lighthouse Institute provides. Once I’ve completed three or  four of the Furthers, we’ll begin the closed beta… which you might have heard about on the grapevine… to which we’ve already invited about twenty players randomly selected from people who’ve been noticeably helpful with bug reporting. We have another randomly-selected twenty ready to go on the final beta before launch, so if you’ve been both helpful and lucky you might hear from us. I’m talking about this here mainly so we don’t get plaintive request emails – sorry folks, this one’s quite small – and I guess also to make the point that being helpful with bug reports gives you a small notional chance of being invited to future betas. If they happen. If we decide not to stop making games and turn Weather Factory into an artisanal custard distillery. I won’t promise we won’t. Hey Lottie, is this marketing? Am I helping?

Back to Lottie.

I actually don’t have A Marketing to bark at you, for once – though I thought you might be interested in the weirdness of translation that I’ve been working on recently. BOOK OF HOURS had a great launch (in large part to you, the people reading this blog post – so thank you extremely much if you were one of our early adopters, especially if you left a nice review). But it also highlighted one of our real weaknesses as a team: with just the two of us, cramming as much game into the game as we can before launching in a sensible indie-budget timeframe, we simply can’t localise the game in time for launch.

I remember some of the other games that launched at the same time as us – Shadow Gambit: the Cursed Crew, for example – came ready packaged with thirteen languages. THIRTEEN. We initially kept up with them until our plucky lil game (4Chan nominated us for ‘Best Game Nobody Played’, you know 💅) slowly but surely fell behind while translated games kept up their momentum. Loc really isn’t the sexiest part of post-launch development – that’s starygazy pie, obviously – but it can profoundly affect a studio’s fortunes, as well as bringing a world you’ve laboured over for years to a new audience, who may love it!

ANYWAY, all this is to say that Simplified Chinese and Russian is coming this August, so I’ve spent several days producing translated assets for several hundred books. This highlights some interesting challenges, like ‘how do pictographic languages deal with initials as short-hand for the full title’? (You try and fit In The Mountains As Upon The Plain There May Not Be A Path Where None Has Passed on a 194px spine. Initials are my friends.) But there are other, weirder challenges too, especially when they enter the ‘does it look like a bum’ area of art direction. What I mean by this is every time an artist draws something, there is always the chance that people look at it and do not see the gorgeously-realised impressionistic image of two mountains at dawn, they see ladyboobs, and you have to redraw them so they are definitely not light-soaked erotic mountain breasts anymore. This becomes important with initials on books, because every so often AK will create a book called something like Semi-Esoeteric Xenophon Youths and we have to rename it. In loc terms, you get to Debate of Seven Cups: ‘DoSC’ in English, no problem, and in Russian of course it’s

…………………………Well. Does this matter? Will it be noticeable to Russian players, playing in Russian? Will it keep me awake at night knowing that there is a book in my serious, beautiful game about life and history and magic with a big rude word down the spine? Yes and yes, I think. So of course I have cunningly changed it to incorporate Roman numerals for ‘seven’, and await the Russian beta with interest.

On a more positive note, loc also makes our books look really cool in other languages. Check out this Chinese selection, for instance –

Points if you can identify them without cheating! Assuming you don’t actually speak Chinese, which is, in this instance, also cheating.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I’ll leave you with a loreful snippet from HOUSE OF LIGHT to infect you with Fascination while you’re waiting for it to actually come out. Are the gods-from-stone ever gentle? The Wheel, perhaps – but Flint? The Seven-Coils? Darest thou trust…. the Egg???

“Yvette and Ehsan speak wistfully of what they have read of the lost Hour called Tide. Yvette recalls that when the Sister withdraws, other Hours sometimes fill the space left by her withdrawal, and wonders whether the Tide is gentle enough to remain afterwards… but Ehsan politely insists that the gods-who-were-stone are never gentle.”

Today I am going to talk some more about linguistic treasures hidden in seemingly ordinary texts. Let’s start where we left off when illustrating the matter of rhythm:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
        by the former
                   prisoner’s
                               energies.”

Have you, perchance, noticed anything extra? Alright, I’ll spoil you the fun:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
        by the former
                   prisoner’s
                               energies.”

Hidden in plain sight, eh? This technique, when one or several letters (sounds, really) are cunningly repeated throughout the phrase, is called alliteration. And this, too, is a very powerful tool. (The ancient Brits, or Icelanders, would even have said magical. No, seriously: in ancient Iceland a properly written alliterative verse was universally taken to hold magical power.) Anyway, this is an aspect that definitely must not be lost in translation.

Funny thing is, a lot of such examples can, theoretically, be chalked up to coincidence. We even had a minor argument with another colleague of mine over this line:

“Elucidate Enlightenment from an Earlier Era”

‘Oh come on,’ she said, ‘The letter E is just statistically the most widely used letter in the English language!’ Alright. Possibly. (Especially given the fact that the actual sounds here aren’t all the same.) Just possibly.

But there comes a point where you can’t ignore it anymore: Alexis Kennedy really loves his alliteration, and that’s a fact.

“I could curl up in the cold beneath the silent statue’s shadow, and see what surfaces in sleep.”

There’s just no way this can be a mere coincidence!

By the way, the desire to preserve these alliterations had been one of the driving forces behind that Great Gatsby translation that I at first found so unorthodox. The book’s translator did their best to preserve these precious phonetic treasures – and it often meant choosing a specific-sounding word (say, a ‘seismograph’, rather than a generalized ‘machine’) over a correct one.

And, needless to say, no machine-translating generative AI is savvy enough to spot and preserve alliteration. It really does require handcrafted translation!

But now – a fly in the ointment. Turns out, different languages have varying degrees of tolerance for alliteration. The English language loves alliteration. Be it marketing slogans, politicians’ speeches, or titles of Jane Austen novels, English is full of these consonances. Not quite so in Russian. Here the effect is usually regarded as sounding funny, and relegated to children’s books. So an aspiring skald must temper their love for alliteration with prudence and temperance.

Thanslating Alexis Kennedy really is a balancing act!

And with this… see you next week for more tales from localisers’ crypt!

The real hot topic from this week, though, is what comes after vegetables. I’ll let AK explain:

“You probably know the George Bernard Shaw crack about the US and the UK being ‘two countries separated by a common language’ (GBS, like many Irish writers, did well out of snarking accurately at British English). BOOK OF HOURS evoked horror and disgust from our American readers with its unsparingly explicit depiction of pre-decimal British currency. But you might not know about pudding.

‘Pudding’, as all her late Majesty’s subjects know, is the correct word for ‘dessert’, at least in traditional English upper class dialect, just as ‘supper’ is the correct word for ‘dinner’. I was brought up middle-middle-class but my mother had upper-middle-class aspirations, so I learnt that we ate ‘pudding’ after ‘supper’ in the evening. If I’d been lower-middle-class or she’d hung around slightly less posh people, we’d have had ‘dessert’ and ‘tea’ (not to be confused with tea, the drink). As it was, if we ate early, say five rather than seven in the evening, the meal was was called ‘high tea’ (which didn’t include the drink ‘tea’, unlike ‘afternoon tea’ for which the drink ‘tea’ would be a central feature).

That was the 1980s, and ‘pudding’ has been largely been driven to the margins by ‘dessert’ now, partly cos America and France, partly cos it sounds stodgy, but you’ll still find it on the menu in very traditional restaurants. And that ‘very traditional’ vibe, heavily flavoured with ‘English country house’ is what we’re going for in the cooking update in HOUSE OF LIGHT. The 20s and the 30s were something of a lost era in English cooking, when we got a bit more experimental and informal. (Then of course the Second World War, and food rationing in its aftermath, helped develop a rep for stodgy monotonous food that isn’t really deserved any more but I grew up in the 70s and 80s and Jesus Christ it was then.) So some of the dishes won’t look English at all, while some of them are so English they’ll make your teeth spin.

tl:dr; pudding is what you call dessert. But Yorkshire pudding is a savoury dish, duh, that you have alongside the main course. And meanwhile, also, when you put sausages in Yorkshire pud, you get toad-in-the-hole. (No, not bangers, sausages are generally only bangers if you put them in mash.) And black pudding is also sausage-related but isn’t something you should google if you plan on sleeping soundly tonight. Alright?”

…You can’t get this sort of #gamedev #content anywhere else, now, can you? It might sound a bit petty that we’re spending weeks of development time deciding on the most historically-plausible menu for a cast of fictional characters who may or may not be invited to dine at a made-up library on a made-up cliff, but this is actually the stuff Weather Factory games are made of! AK’s particular brand of bizarre but internally consistent period RPGs underpinned by a complex Aspect system means we not only have to research period-appropriate foodstuffs, but they have to make sense of people’s systemic affiliations too. For example, DI Douglas Moore feels like someone who’s more likely to want a simple, manly sandwich than some fancy French nonsense, but is there a manly sandwich that evokes his Principles of Heart and Lantern?

Speaking of Aspects, they’re also a good way to show the sorts of things we’ve been working on without spoilering anyone. So here’s a selection of new Aspects going into HOUSE OF LIGHT:

They range from aspects for all 63 non-language Skills in game to Agendas, Fears and Sympathies (feelings and intentions Visitors have which will affect their work if you add them to the Lighthouse Institute board). How many of them can you identify, do you think…?

ANYWAY. I hope to have some HOUSE OF LIGHT screenshots for you soon, but AK will be working on his lonesome next week as I have been called for a mysterious life event that I can’t talk about until afterwards. Until then!

First, a… warning? This is going to be a series of longish weekly (?) posts with no TL;DR takeaways. But we are confident that the core Alexis Kennedy audience doesn’t mind a bit of reading.

But I seem to be forgetting my manners! An introduction is in order: my name is Boris, and whenever I say we, I mean me and my colleague Mikhail. We are a two-geek team of Alexis Kennedy aficionados dispatched by Riotloc (of Baldur’s Gate 3 fame) to help Weather Factory localise Book of Hours into Russian. (Because OF COURSE a team whose forte is handcrafted localisation of narrative-rich videogames is bound to have its own chapter of the Alexis Kennedy fan club!) 

So, what can I say? Book of Hours is, without a doubt, a unique gig. At a minimum, unique in terms of how we go about localising it. As funny as it may sound, with Alexis’s prose we often find ourselves spending inordinate amounts of time on a single sentence, writing, and rewriting the translation – only to realise a couple of days later (usually during a lunch break or a family dinner) that there is a still better way to phrase it (which we HAVE to write down that very instant!).

I recently asked Alexis whether his writing routine looks like Mozart effortlessly transcribing his music, or like F. Scott Fitzgerald endlessly rewriting his masterpiece until it reads just right. He quoted Hemingway by way of an answer: ‘I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket’.

By the way, it is no random thing that I mentioned Fitzgerald. I vividly recall an episode from my Translation Studies where we were given different translations of The Great Gatsby and told to argue which of them was better. I distinctly remember poring over one such translation genuinely wondering why on Earth did the translator make so many lexical departures from the source material?

The answer is, there are more things to meaning, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your strict literal translation orthodoxy (or something like that; sorry, Shakespeare mate). Things like flow; prosody; visuality; alliteration. The Great Gatsby had them in spades, and, translated literally, would have lost most of what made it so, so beautiful.

Well, thus appropriately humbled, I try to go about reading Alexis’ prose in a more nuanced manner, always on the lookout for things beyond mere literal meaning. And things beyond mere literal meaning there are!

Take the following description:

“There in a smoothed hollow at the altar’s foot – something coiled like a serpent, but stiller by far.”

Seems straightforward enough, eh? You can probably Google Translate it into another language, and the meaning will be there, right? Right?

How about we arrange the phrase’s presentation a bit differently:

“There in a smoothed hollow at the altar’s foot –
something coiled like a serpent,
but stiller by far.”

Unless you are a chatbot, by now it should be pretty obvious that this looks suspiciously like poetry. Not strictly haiku verses, no – the same principles apply to things like rhetoric, speeches, etc. This particular technique is called a descending tricolon: when the phrase is arranged in lines of decreasing length.

Here’s a famous example from Churchill:

“(Never in the field of human conflict)
has so much been owed
by so many
to so few.”

There is also a reverse, or ascending, tricolon. Churchill once again:

“Now this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

So, with that in mind, one will probably think twice before treating the following line of Kennedy’s as mere prose:

“Here, impossibly preserved, enfolded in the scars inflicted by the former prisoner’s energies.”

Let me arrange it for you:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
          by the former
                       prisoner’s
                                   energies.”

And this isn’t us philologists discussing arcane minutiae of the English language. These are incredibly potent tools that help poets, writers, and politicians charm their audience. To lose this aspect of a text would make it powerless, neutered. It simply won’t do.

And this is where we break off. Next time I will continue with my story of the eldritch horrors that lurk beneath Alexis Kennedy’s prose (kidding). Stay tuned!

Launch news first! The Lucid Tarot colouring book is NOW AVAILABLE on the Etsy shop. This is our first foray in to big, juicy art books – it’s only A5, but it’s nice and chunky because the pages are thick (so they can absorb whatever colouring’s applied to them without bleeding through the page). Check it out!

This is your first opportunity to look at all 78 cards of the Lucid Tarot deck in detail, and/or an excuse to spend hours and hours relaxing with an adult colouring book and your pens / pencils / crayons / pots of Porphyrine. It’s 172 pages of the Hours (and their Minor Arcana friends) as you’ve never seen them before – because YOU haven’t decided what Principles to associate with them. Well, now’s your chance! Scandalise the community by colouring the Hermit in flaming hues of Forge-y orange. Give the Stymphling a makeover in Nectar green. Each Hour has its colour, but maybe you disagree…

Aside from new merch, we’ve also been hard at work on HOUSE OF LIGHT. We’re not ready to share screenshots or release dates yet (though both of those are coming soon), but here’s a glance at some of the game writing and design decisions AK’s been wrangling with in the expansion.

AK here, talking about talking.

There’s about twelve thousand words of direct, in-character speech in BOOK OF HOURS – mostly things that Visitors say to you about their business, plus a little bit of villager chat.

“Heist? Oriflamme’s? Poppycock. Forgeries? Poppycock. Bureau all over the place arresting everyone though. Worse than Ortucchio. Bloody pardon me pain in my bloody pardon me hinder parts pardon me.”

— Dagmar, from The Affair of the Oriflamme Heist

None of it is the Librarian, who, says nothing at all out loud. This is mostly the result of a perennial game-writing problem: there’s a risk when you put words into the player’s mouth that the words aren’t ones they’d choose to say, though there’s more leeway with internal monologues, mental asides, and formal contexts like letter-writing.

Some games deal with this by making the words as bland as possible, which is only a solution in games where writing isn’t important.

A second solution is to make the words sufficiently characterful or witty that the player enjoys feeling they said them, which is easier when the PC is a strong character, say, a noir protagonist like Disco Elysium’s.

A third solution is writing several different lines for the PC to choose and hoping at least one lands, which you almost always have to do in a trad CRPG, and which at least diffuses the problem, though you’ll still often find (e.g.) you’re offered Haughty, Direct or Cheery when what you really wanted was Professional, or whatever. (Owlcat’s latest offering did this well, partly because the protag’s attitude to their exalted position naturally breaks one of several ways – partly by throwing a lot of text at the problem – partly because the writing was, by and large unusually good).

And a fourth common solution, one that I usually favour, is the silent protagonist. This is a natural fit anyway for a game where the most likely line of dialogue for the protagonist is shh! It’s put me in a slightly odd place with salons, though – the social events you’re holding for Visitors in HOUSE OF LIGHT. Various Visitors are probably going to be subject to occasional outbreaks of direct speech, but the host will likely keep their mouth shut – the current (TBC!) design is that you can sometimes intervene by adding a Soul card, but more along the lines of directing conversation than holding forth. I guess this makes the Librarian a better host, though. I did start worrying that it was odd that you serve food for your guests and don’t cater for yourself. I briefly fiddled with adding it to the design. But then I thought, is anyone really going to complain if I make salons require 20% less canned ham? Probably yes. But then that’s more canned ham for the rest of us.

What I can share, though, are some juicy new details: because the HOUSE OF LIGHT Steam page is now live! If you can, please head over and wishlist it, even if you’re a lucky Perpetual Edition holder who’ll get the expansion for free when it launches. (Wishlists make Steam think we’ll make them £££ which means they’re more likely to promote HoL / BOOK OF HOURS. Cf the algorithm section on this page from history.) It also means you’ll receive an email the moment the expansion is live, so you can dive in and start playing lickety-split. Thank you!

Here’s a gloss on the main points you’ll see on the HoL Steam page, to explain where we’re taking things…

Social Events

Host influential dinner parties in the crumbling splendour of Hush House. Choose a location that suits you – the Hall of Division, the Chapter House, or the Physic Garden, perhaps? – and send out invitations. Become tastemaker of the occult demimonde, or curate an exclusive society of only the most select adepts. Get to know the great and the good, introduce topics for discussion around the table, and observe the chemistry – or animus – between your guests. You’ll need food, drink, ambience, entertainment and more, but a successful soirée will influence the world in subtle ways, sending ripples far beyond your walls.

NB: AK is still working on the design and this is TBC, but it might be possible to to invite Visitors AND named Assistants – which means you could sit Reverend Timothy down next to Aunt Mopsy and see whether Good triumphs over Evil, or sandwich Denzil between Franklin Bancroft and Daymare to torture his saturnine soul.

Cooking

Your guests will grow hungry, and it’s up to you to cater to their interesting palates. Bake honey sandwich cakes and pair with port. Perfect beef suet pudding. Serve veal and cucumber, dark-smelling ‘garden nectar’, or a simple bowl of tinned peaches and cream. Dive into the dangerous world of 1930s European recipes and influence your attendees with your choice of spices, sweetmeats and dainties.

NB: like my teacake point above, PLEASE NOTE that we do not guarantee the presence of honey sandwich cakes, port, beef suet pudding, veal and/or cucumber, or tinned peaches and cream. We haven’t yet confirmed exactly what recipes you’ll be able to cook in the game, though we will update the description to reflect specific recipes nearer the time if they change from this list. If it makes you feel better, ‘garden nectar’ was actually a thing in 1930s English cuisine, apparently ‘an elegant variation of borscht’ which AK will undoubtedly turn into something horrible like Mondays broiled in the blood of the Thunderskin or something. In hindsight, maybe that doesn’t make you feel better.

Advanced Visitor Stories

You’ve dabbled in the Affair of the Oriflamme Heist. You’ve guessed what lies in the Messenger’s Casket. Now help your Visitors delve deeper. Encourage alliances between strangers, or convince an ally to help you stymie a foe. Using an innovative new system, influence the wider world with in-depth Visitor stories and see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree. Where now does the dappled rose flourish? What did Zuthi hear at the Roost? What is the deeper connection between Rowena, Yvette, and Ys?

Once you’ve met someone, you’ll also be able to add them to your address book and invite them to Hush House to pursue their business at a time of your choosing. When the Librarian calls, the invisible world listens.

NB: take particular note of ‘innovative new system’ and ‘see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree’. Again, this is more UI I can’t show you yet but it is a new format for storytelling in BOOK OF HOURS that a) looks significantly different from stories played out elsewhere in situation windows and b) connects more closely with the Wisdom Tree. More on that later, with pictures.

The Lighthouse Institute

You’ve wined, dined and appraised your chosen guests – now decide who’s worthy to form the board of the Lighthouse Institute. Who should be Treasurer? Who might suit Secretary Vigilant? Does your group all share the same agenda, or does one boardmember sympathise with the Chandler, while another fears his coming Dawn?

Your selection will found the influential Lighthouse Institute and set its course through the world. So take your time, and choose wisely.

Lucid Tarot colouring book

On another news-y note, we announced earlier this week that the Lucid Tarot colouring book – showcasing all 78 cards from our upcoming transparent stained-glass PVC deck – will launch on the merch shop on Wednesday 28th February. As with all our new merch, this is an experiment so it’s initially a limited edition: there’re only 500 copies of this colouring book, to get a sense of appetite for the item in question. They’re really lovely, though – so if you fancy a quiet night in with a glass of wine, or a sunlit afternoon watching YouTube and doodling or something – I think you might like them. 🙂

Remember this from the advent calendar?

It is now a reality! Our very first piece of jewellery – the golden Wisdom Tree necklace – is out now on the Etsy shop. Featuring all the Wisdoms from Birdsong to Skolekosophy, you can now adorn yourself with the occult symbol over which scholars have squabbled for centuries. We’re only making 500 of these as a test run, to see how jewellery sells. Maybe Cultist fans despise vanity! Maybe BOOK OF HOURS players are too busy reading books! Well, if you do want a beautiful gold-plated pendant for your or someone else’s neck, get it while stocks last…

(I especially recommend purchasing now if you intend these as any sort of Valentine’s gift. International shipping takes 3+weeks, so sooner is better!)

While we’re talking merch, we have the Hours notebooks (replacing the long-lost Cultist notebook which ran out a few years ago now), our tarot adult colouring book…

…and the Lucid Tarot itself finally shouldering its way through the world’s skin, like a clawed and ruthless uncle or a headless flapping bear. Hush House cat is on the scene to inspect the latest prototype, featuring for the first time ever our custom velvet tarot bag.

If you’re signed up to the mailing list you’ll get an email any time we launch any of these, so I recommend it! Especially as The Lucid Tarot will initially launch with 500 limited editions including a signed certificate of authenticity, so those might go quickly.

In other actual video game news, AK released a new patch – EHSAN – to beta, containing:

I haven’t heard of anyone finding the ‘well-hidden surprises’ yet – I yelped with surprise and delight the first time I found them – so perhaps they’re too well-hidden. It’ll move to the main branch some time next month now AK’s fixed the bug that removed all unlocking requirements from certain rooms, and the one that seemed to play the shrieking howl of the Wolf-Divided every time you clicked a button.

Over to AK…

The EHSAN e.7 patch is the fifth major patch and the… fortieth? incremental update since launch. I started typing a long preening bit about all the changes we’d put in and then realised that would be interesting mostly to me, so I’ll spare you lot, but if you are interested, the in-game patch notes go all the way back to October, and the TWELVE DISMAYS OF CHRISTMAS post explains the silliest bug of my career. The well-hidden surprises Lottie mentions: apparently one player found one with the assistance of their dog; others may be available to a keen-eyed, or a forward-looking, Librarian. There’ll be more quality-of-life updates eventually, but for now I’m shifting focus to the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, so those updates will likely arrive in a free update alongside it.

While I work on HOUSE OF LIGHT I’m also answering dozens of questions from our Chinese, Japanese and Russian translators. Just as with Cultist Simulator,  localisation is a trip. We vetted all three teams to make sure they include fans who understand the context, and it’s bloody great to be answering questions this detailed, but it’s hard work. I remember sitting in a hut in Dungeness inventing daft hybrid etymologies and thinking ‘this’ll haunt me if we do Chinese again’; well, now I’m haunted. Some of my recent answers:

• “Both suggest a cross in English. ‘Rood’ is an Old English term for the Christian cross, ‘Cruciate’ is from Latin crucis, cross. ‘Chancel’ has several meanings in English but one is the dividing screen between the more and less holy parts of a church – which is also known as the ‘rood screen’. The terms are as you say all largely equivalent and the general sense of ‘something that separates the profane from the sacred / more sacred from less sacred’ would be good. If in doubt, I’d just use the same term three times.”
• “There’s an obscure adjective, ‘nivean’, from Latin nix/nivis, which means snow-white. I used a variant spelling because ‘Nivea’ is a popular European skin-care brand 🙃”
• “Speculum is Latin for mirror, and later in English was used to mean (a) a particular kind of mirror used in telescopes (b) a scrying-mirror used by seers. So ‘speculist’ implies a mirror-specialist, probably with an occult connection. NB a speculum in modern English refers exclusively to a medical instrument used by gynaecologists! This is definitely _not_ a reference I want to imply here.”

HOUSE OF LIGHT. I want to do three things with this:

• • • Variety of outcomes from the Visitor stories. I actually loathe the term ‘branching narrative’ because it imprisons us in a 1990s idea of CYOA tree-diagram structures, but ‘stories with variety in outcome’ lacks zing. Whichever term you use, there ain’t any of it in the Visitor stories as they stand. Partly this is just because I wouldn’t have had time to write the things, partly because it’s hard, maybe impossible, to write stories with variant outcomes in a game that explicitly tells you that there are no mistakes and you can’t lock yourself out of anything (ask ten dedicated CRPG players of your acquaintance how many of them don’t look at a wiki nowadays before making a key narrative decision – and then imagine finding you’ve missed out on a decision because the visitor came and went while you were unlocking the Wine Cellar). But obviously people were always going to want more (a) relevant story about (b) known characters with (c) choices that allow self-expression. So releasing that as an expansion neatly addresses both probs: we now have some months we didn’t have before launch, and it’ll be an opt-in for people who’ve played the game once already or who want a bit more variety in their outcome, FOMO be damned.
    • Cooking, and social events. There’s a bag of flour and a mixing bowl in the Hush House kitchens, but you can’t bake a cake. This is because we started with art for the kitchens, which we sliced up and turned into manipulable objects, and some fitted more naturally into the crafting system than others. But that’s not relevant to people who just want to bake a cake. Or have vegetables less generic than a sack. Meanwhile I’ve seen a heartening number of players talk about how they in-game RP afternoon tea with Visitors and villagers. And it ties together with more Visitor engagement. Some parts of this point may end up in the game as a free update – I don’t know until I’ve worked through the design – it depends on how easy or not it is to tease apart from the rest.
    • A bridge to the next game. Lottie and I have an unusually clear idea about Game Three – though we might change our minds and we won’t be starting on it until at least 2025 – and I want to lay down a few barrels of the good story so it’ll be aged and flavourful by the time it shows up in Three. I’m also planning ahead and trying out some ideas with design, with narrative structure and with UI that – by Three – should ultimately take us beyond windows-and-slots. It’s a good model, it’s brought us a long way, but it does feel sometimes like trying to write through a keyhole.

To establish a skeleton that links all that, I’m going off to spend a week in a quiet place with good light, a very large table and a boxful of cards and coloured pens (and zero cats, so I can go to bed with a tableful of cards and enjoy a morning without regret) – while Lottie tinkers with a prototype for something to do with BOOK OF HOURS’ visuals which will, we hope, make some people fall off their chairs.

‘Til next time…

— ‘Ulysses’, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson knows what’s what. It’s hard to sit still with art: it jiggles around like a catnipped kitten or a goose on a Roomba or a kid who needs the loo. We’ve been updating BOOK OF HOURS a lot, and it’s put new wind in our sails as a studio – but we have mountains of ideas, and we’ve been working on other things as well.

Tennyson also says that you are a part of all that you have met – so if you’re here, reading this, you’re part of the Secret Histories, too. Here’s a round-up of all the things that have just launched or that you and we both can look forward to in 2024.

BOOK OF HOURS content expansion

“Only twins drown twice.”

Europe, 1937. The War in the World is coming, and worse yet, the War in the Sun. In this gathering gloom, the notables of the occult underworld consider new weapons; new alliances; new paths. Who can they turn to for help, if not the Librarian of Hush House?

Explore visitors and their stories in much greater depth. Host exotic feasts and sophisticated soirées. And in your own quiet way, shape the genesis of the controversial Lighthouse Institute.

The big ticket item is the HOUSE OF LIGHT content expansion, coming to BOOK OF HOURS in 2024. It’ll be more like the Exile DLC in size than The Dancer, and will be a paid DLC (though free to anyone with Perpetual Edition).

It’s one of several content expansions planned for BOOK OF HOURS, which we’re hoping to release next year alongside with the QoL / general improvement patches you’ve been seeing already. So buckle up, librarians! Or more appropriately, get yourself nice and comfy under that charming wool blanket. Brancrug calls.

BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack

Featuring twenty-five remastered tracks from the game, arranged by the composer, Maribeth Solomon, herself. It’s available now, costs $10.99 / £8.99 / €9.99 and you can get it on (deep breath): Steam, GOG, Spotify, iTunes, YouTube Music, Amazon, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Medianet, Pandora AND EVEN MORE go see if you can find a place we aren’t listed. Who ever said baiting the internet was a bad idea?

BOOK OF HOURS localisation

A small but significant confirmation that we are now working on official Simplified Chinese, Russian and Japanese translations of BOOK OF HOURS. These will almost certainly come out next year!

Depending on how these languages do at launch, we may add more localisation in future. Fingers crossed.

Secret Histories merch

The Church o’ Merch has been in need of a bit of a revamp for a while, but I was too busy with BOOK OF HOURS to give it the love it deserved. December was a great time to right this wrong, so we now have a variety of new items coming to the shop next year:

Tarot colouring book

An A5 wiro-bound colouring book with all 78 Lucid Tarot cards in glorious black and white for you to bring to life. Pages are thick so they’ll carry everything from crayon to felt-tip pens. Colour in while listening to your favourite piece of music, sipping your favourite beverage, and generally having a jolly chill time.

Wisdom Tree necklace

The first piece of jewellery we’ve ever made! Keep your Wisdoms close with this gold pendant chain with embossing, coloured enamel and cut-out detailing.

Hours notebooks

Hardback French-creased notebooks with cloth covers, foiled detailing and page-marker ribbons! Inside, the Magician has lined paper, the Hermit plain and the Wheel of Fortune dotted. They’ll be available individually or as a beautiful threefold set. These should look classy and occult at the same time – more photos when I get them from the printers.

Lucid Tarot

Just an update on the long-awaited Lucid Tarot deck, which is currently in production at two different factories for a test deck. Hoping to have two test decks early in the new year, and be able to move into the first production run. More on that when I have more news! It’s taking a while because what I’m trying to do is, frankly, so weird. But it’s wonderful making weird, and bearing in mind this project began here…

…I’m pretty happy how it’s turning out.

(The scholars of the House watched the courses of the stars to determine their pasts and understand their future. You just need to be on the mailing list if you want to know when these items come out. They’ll all be limited runs initially, so get in quick!)

Reverend Timothy’s gifts

A number of small gifts appeared by Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree in BOOK OF HOURS. They’re still there if you haven’t collected them, and they’ll remain until midnight on 31st December 2023. If you’d like your in-game advent calendar gifts, load up BOOK OF HOURS some time between now and the end of the year, wait until in-game winter rolls around and find your horde by the Rectory. For those of you who don’t like surprises, you can see exactly what awaits by clicking below.

Cultist Simulator on Steam Deck

It’s been a long-time coming (h/t our long-time coder-collaborator, Chelnoque), but Cultist Simulator is now Verified on Steam Deck! We’re testing it out on a beta before rolling it out to the main branch. Deck-owners who’d like to check it out just need to opt in to beta (Steam Library > Cultist Simulator > Properties > Betas > ‘gateofhorn’ in the dropdown menu). As ever, if you run into any issues, please let us know at support@weatherfactory.biz.

Everything else

Finally, we updated user flairs on the subreddit (tag yourself with any of the nine starting Legacies, from Archaeologist to Twice-Born), released a new Skeleton Songs all about how much we love Susanna Clarke, and there’s a wintry HD Hush House wallpaper for PC and mobile at the bottom of our freebie On the House page, in case you’d like to festive-up your backgrounds.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Kiss your beloveds, hug your loved ones. If you’ve had a good year, long may that continue. If a bad one, remember: though much is taken, much abides. Love from AK, myself and the House Without Walls. See you in 2024. ♥

🎁🎄 …a 25-day advent calendar of Hush House! 🎄🎁

Each day we’ll open a door containing treats in BOOK OF HOURS or the ‘real’ world (you’ll see it on all of our socials [ Twitter / Facebook / Instagram ], and we’ll update this blog daily with What’s Behind Today’s Door).

Most are tasty amuses-bouches. Some are pretty major reveals. A few real world treats will only last for 24hrs, but you’ll never miss anything in-game. Playing BOOK OF HOURS any time in December will give you everything the calendar’s revealed to date whenever in-game winter rolls around. So there’s no stress if you’re ‘out’ having ‘fun’ with ‘friends’. Except, you know. Have a think about your life choices there.

Door 1: Seasonal art in BOOK OF HOURS

The next time you’re playing BOOK OF HOURS and winter comes around, you’ll notice some festive cheer sprinkled throughout Brancrug Village and Hush House. For anyone who wants to be left alone like the Weary Detective and his Illustrated London News, there’s an option to turn off seasonal art in the Settings menu. For everyone else, take careful note of Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree next to the Rectory…

Door 2: something smooth as an egg and frosted like a winter window

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 3: 24% off The Lady Afterwards for 24hrs

Both the boxed and digital version of The Lady Afterwards are 24% off for 24hrs. Seek the occult in 1920s Alexandria, in a luxury Call of Cthulhu-esque TRPG based in the world of Cultist Simulator!

Door 4: something fiendishly simple and wretchedly fragile

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 5: new Reddit user flairs

By popular demand, we’ve added BOOK OF HOURS-specific user flairs to the subreddit. Mark yourself as your favourite starting character, from the Archaeologist to the Twice-Born!

Door 6: something hard for mortal men to dig

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 7: new colouring book

This is another item people have been asking about for a while. We’re launching a tarot-based adult colouring book in 2024, featuring the stained glass tarot art from the Lucid Tarot!

Door 8: something salty and savoury

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 9: 24% off the Tarot of the Hours for 24hrs

Our best-selling item, the Tarot of the Hours, is 24% off for 24hrs.

Door 10: something healthful and slippery

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 11: “Only twins drown twice.”

Europe, 1937. The War in the World is coming, and worse yet, the War in the Sun. In this gathering gloom, the notables of the occult underworld consider new weapons; new alliances; new paths. Who can they turn to for help, if not the Librarian of Hush House?

Explore visitors and their stories in much greater depth. Host exotic feasts and sophisticated soirées. And in your own quiet way, shape the genesis of the controversial Lighthouse Institute. The HOUSE OF LIGHT content expansion comes to BOOK OF HOURS next year!

Door 12: something ‘musky’

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 13: 24% off the Mansus for 24hrs

Our fine art Mansus poster is 24% off for 24hrs. Decorate your walls with the House Without Walls!

Door 14: something from the shores of Brancrug

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 15: BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack out now!

At long last, the BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack is now available on Steam, GOG, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and many other places! Featuring remastered versions of music from the game, customised and ordered by Maribeth Solomon and Mickymar Productions. Sublime.

Door 16: new Wisdom Tree necklace

This is something we’ve never made before! Look out for our new gold and enamel Wisdom Tree pendant necklace, coming to the merch shop in 2024.

Door 17: something alive to every draught and spark

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 18: The Wood Between the Worlds

Lord of the Rings + Narnia + Jane Austen = ? Listen to a brand new episode of Skeleton Songs, all about the beautiful world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Piranesi, and a very ‘English’ magic system.

Door 19: something not alive (or not very)

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 20: new notebooks

We retired our Cultist Simulator journal a few years ago, and are finally back with revamped notebooks inspired by BOOK OF HOURS. Coming 2024!

Door 21: something that can only strike Now

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 22: Cultist Simulator on Steam Deck

Cultist Simulator’s Verified on Steam Deck! The new version’s available on beta and should work smooth as butter. (But please send bug reports to support@weatherfactory.biz, if you find any.)

Door 23: something that will not, will not, will not stop dancing

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 24: HD Christmas wallpapers

Two new HD wallpapers for desktop and mobile to download On the House. Featuring Hush House in the snow and the Wisdom Tree.

Door 25: something whose brightness lingers for a little while, even in the dark

Merry Christmas! Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

And that’s it! Warmth, good cheer and a glass of Chateau Raveline to you and yours. Merry Christmas, friend.

;

— Aunt Mopsy

Trading Cards are Go

Soundtrack coming soon

Next up: DAYMARE

• Mail ordering some items (from Cater & Hero, and from TRN Ltd). Ordering from a catalogue will be a baroque and leisurely process. It’ll reinforce Brancrug’s remoteness, and it won’t be trivial to top up supplies. But it’ll fill some gaps and it’ll add some flavour.
• In-game shelf labels! The Skolekosophy section? The Possibly Contaminated section? Unconfirmed Crafting Recipes? Useful Memories (though the book/Memory system may be coming up for a change)? Notes to yourself about who Janus is and who Hendrick was?
• Some UI refresh stuff – e.g. what Lottie refers to as ‘spiffing timers’ to make workstations a bit prettier
• Some more zoom tuning (restoring simultaneous arrow key movement and zoom-to, and I’ll look at the zoom levels again)

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but: BOOK OF HOURS is OUT NOW on Steam and GOG! 😱😱😱😱

If you like what you see, leave us a review. Our games tend towards the weird and inexplicable, and it’s incredibly helpful to let other gamers know that we’ve not just, like, knitted a sock and drawn a face on it or something. Help unweird and explicate us! As much as is possible. ♥

After Cultist Simulator, we wanted to set our next game in the same universe – but AK felt bad that he’d made another game about eating people and bringing the apocalypse, and he wanted to write something kinder. Fast forward four years and here we are, in the soft golden glow of a deep auburn game about managing an occult library, of organising things carefully and thoughtfully, of being left alone in a beautiful Gormenghastian abbey to light candles and read books and walk the parapets, where every so often someone drops by to ask you something or give you a book – and then they go away again. BOOK OF HOURS: the introvert’s dream!

I thought you might be interested in some fragments of development history. You might recognise some things that evolved into the game we’ve just released, and others that (rightly) were left by the wayside because for the love of god how was that UI ever going to work? Here’s a little sample:

Early sketches for our hero art:

Some of the earliest design notes:

The first draft layout of Hush House:

Early Hush House design:

Some early prototypes of what BoH‘s art might look like:

Our ‘porthole’ phase:

We wanted to build something that had the crunchy recipe-based mechanics of Cultist Sim but was a welcoming place, somewhere you could go just to be on your own even if you weren’t working to achieve anything: a sun-dappled hammock; a candle-lit nook; a secret walled garden whose only key is yours. BOOK OF HOURS will not be for everyone, but I hope everyone can feel the love we poured in radiating from the worn stones of Hush House, the wave-weathered rocks around Crowcross Sands, the lamp-lit leaded-glass windows of the Sweet Bones, and the purr of the well-fed cat you brought in from the cold.

The mellifluous Systemchalk is broadcasting BOOK OF HOURS live on the Steam page, if you’d like to see the game in action. Alternatively, join us at 8PM BST / 12PM PDT for an AMA on r/Gaming (live here!), or in a live interview on GOG’s Twitch stream tomorrow at 7PM BST / 11AM PDT. Thank you so much for reading, and if you decide to pick up BOOK OF HOURS this week, may the Hours look kindly on your deeds.

Love, Lottie & Alexis