Shadow Play

In the Salt Court at Meridian a crowd stands in silence while a clerk reads names from a ledger. "Vess, Elise." You step forward instead. You invoke substitution, blood for blood of the same house, and you sign your own name under the printed oath: Given freely. Sworn willing. Liora Vess is decided. Willing is another matter.

This is the Long Dusk. The sun is being paid out, and the world keeps one law: what is taken poisons, what is offered sustains. Vespertine, the dusk house you are bound for, was built to think in candlelight, and Madame Vhorel gives you its rule on the first night: you may walk anywhere a lit candle stands. Behind you are your father Doran, a surgeon on Lantern Street, and your sister Elise. On the road is Mistress Farr, who teaches the offering rite in the coach over a tin of ginger biscuits. Waiting at the end of the road are Captain Rhen Marrow and Corvain, the lord of the house, who was not supposed to want you, and was not supposed to ask.

Shadow Play is a point-and-click adventure in the old style, told in cut-paper silhouettes like the shadow films of the 1920s. Under the stage sits a bar of verbs: Walk to, Look at, Pick up, Use, Open, Talk to, Give. Choose a verb, then a thing, and the line beneath the stage builds the sentence as you point. Look at anything and Liora answers as a surgeon's daughter would, counting and pricing as she goes: "That lamp costs more a month than I do." There is no death and no dead end, and What now? gives you a hint in Liora's own voice.

The house has one rule, and the whole game turns on it. You can pick up objects. You have to ask people. Try Pick up on a person and Liora will tell you why not. Take something that should have been asked for and it comes back grey, because the fading takes colour first, and a grey thing will not do its job, so you return it and ask. Ask is not on the bar when you begin. Liora earns it in the great hall, when she offers her wrist by the rite and the lord of the house answers, "Nothing here will be taken from you." Then the new verb is inked onto the bar, letter by letter.

Part the First plays The Tithe from its first chapter to its last, ending included, across twelve rooms, from the Salt Court and Lantern Street to the candlelit corridors and galleries of Vespertine. Every line is read by a digital voice. The Ledger, a rag-paper book in Liora's hand, fills its ten pages as you play. Where the book is intimate, the game cuts to a card. It plays in the browser on a desktop, a tablet or a phone held sideways.

Shadow Play is planned in five Parts, one for each Nocturnals novel, and each Part changes the verb bar. The Ledger carries across them, and later hands annotate the earlier pages, corrections included.

The game is adapted from The Tithe, the first of the five Nocturnals novels by A. M. Vespertine. Every line it quotes is checked by script against its chapter: 553 of the game's lines are the book's own words.

Shadow Play is in development for the web and is meant for adults (18+). Part the First is built and playable from beginning to end, and Part the Second, The Hunt, is being built.