Grootslang
From the novel by Ayo Adeyemi
The game we see here
A survey crew rides the cage down to a sealed section of an old diamond mine. Below the 300-metre line the cave walls are studded with diamonds, and something thirty metres long is listening. Take a stone and it wakes. Run and it finds you. Carry enough back above the line before the cave goes dark, or put a stone back and hope it settles.
Why this world
Low-priced co-op games for groups of friends are the biggest sellers among new indie releases, and short co-op horror runs suit original worlds on the platforms we build for. The novel writes the rules: the creature cannot climb above 300 metres, taking a stone wakes it and returning one calms it, it hunts by sound so running is the worst thing you can do, and the light in its scales shifts as it moves from resting to hunting. The rules are learned one at a time, at a cost.
The book · Literary Fiction
The cage shudders to a halt three hundred and eighty metres beneath the Northern Cape. Six people step out into a section of the Kimberley diamond mines that has been sealed and forgotten, into an air that is suddenly, impossibly warm. Their headlamps pick out a cathedral-scale cavity. Diamonds line its walls. They have come for the diamonds.
Jabari has been here once before, fifty-three years ago. He carries in his pocket a folded page he has never shown anyone, and he has spent half a century trying not to come back. The others — a geologist with her instruments, a corporate fixer, the men with the drills — read the cavity as a payday. Jabari reads it as a room with something in it.
What is in it is older than human language. Thirty metres of body, part elephant, part serpent, sustained by an intelligence proportional to its size and a territorial logic that has been entirely reasonable for longer than there have been people to reason with. It does not attack on entry. It assesses. It has rules.
The question the cavity asks is whether the survivors can learn those rules in the time the creature is willing to give them — and whether the knowledge that might have saved them was, all along, sitting in a pocket and a folder, waiting to be read.
Games set in this world
Game adaptation is considered per title when the world-building can support it. Pitching is the first step; it is not a licence. See rights at Greenlight Publishing.