THE RITUAL IS COMPLETE! Black Heaven is finished and released to backers! Thanks to our 300+ backers and over $13,000 raised, we have brought this project to life!
Right now, the plan is to keep the game exclusive to Kickstarter backers for about 3 months, then release the game on Steam and Itch.io. Keep your eyes peeled for more updates!
Here are some screenshots and image assets from the complete game:
You can download the free 2-hour Extended Demo for Black Heaven here!
After almost two years of development, Black Heaven is nearly ready for release to Kickstarter backers! Here’s a summary of what’s coming:
The game has reached almost 400,000 words (including the separate romance routes), which is more than the combined wordcount of Fellowship of the Ring and Dune!
Linnea Kataja has created dozens of beautiful sprite artworks, including costume changes, expressions, and terrifying horror forms!
The game features 50+ backgrounds commissioned from Lim Chin Yang, and each one has been as stunning as the last.
Marek Domagala has been tirelessly working to compose, revise, and sharpen the game’s tracks, which include over 15 unique songs and roughly 45 Fractal Madness versions of those songs–three for each track.
The Seeker mini-game has been completed, and some of the private playtesters have already called it “addicting” and “fun”!
Here are some screenshots of what the game looks like so far:
We’ve also created a fun, free personality quiz that matches you with one of the characters–try it out here!
You can download the free 2-hour Extended Demo for Black Heaven here!
Announcements!
First, the final chapter of “The Crownless King” (Part 4) is up on The Fantasy Hive, marking one of the darkest and most heart-wrenching endings to a story I’ve written in years.
Second, “Old No-Eyes” is up on Beneath Ceaseless Skies and it’s received its first review from Charles Payseur, an SFF reviewer and blogger, who nails the key theme of the story:
…to be immortal is to face the infinite, and to face the infinite means to annihilate the self. It’s an idea that means complete destruction in some ways, because a person cannot touch upon true infinity without being destroyed by it. They become no one, an absence, one with the universe. It shakes necromancy because the necromancers are egoists, are selfish and cruel. Not that Yute seems to have gotten over all of that. But he has become that which necromancy was point to, which means he is the realization of a goal that perhaps was never meant to be reached. The horror falls from the growing realizing that this group has [planted] the seed for their own destruction, and from the horror of what Yute has embraced on his way to immortality—true immortality. Dark, heady, and very much worth spending some time with!
Third, I’ve got new articles up on The Portalist and SyFyWIRE–one on what ‘serious’ fantasy writers can learn from Terry Pratchett and one on the real-life science behind giant robots!
After submitting “Old No-Eyes” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies way back in April 2017, it’s finally being published in two weeks!
Thanks to Scott Andrews, the editor at BCS, “Old No-Eyes” ended up becoming even better over the course of a few months of edits (and a lot of emails back and forth). With “Hypnotica” and “The Crownless King” serialized on The Fantasy Hive, this will be my third story released to the public, which is really exciting. Each of the stories takes place in the same secondary world, though at different points along the timeline: “Old No-Eyes” takes place in the same city as “Hypnotica“ (Senkaku), and reveals a few more hints about Togorun, who was mentioned in “Crownless King.”
“Old No-Eyes” centers on Yute, a disgraced immortality scholar who returns from exile to meet with an old colleague named Tenza, who has asked for his help in decoding a forbidden book called the Nokizi. The story introduces readers to some of the major elements of my world, especially immortality and fractal mathematics.
I’m super proud to finally have this story published, and I look forward to unleashing Yute (one of my favorite characters) on an unsuspecting world.
This past month, I interviewed for a job at a game company and had a gushing, energetic conversation with four staff members about how much we all loved the game Doki Doki Literature Club, a Japanese dating sim that’s taken the internet (and numerous awards) by storm.
Soon after, however, I had a long Skype conversation with my Ma. My Ma and I always have deep conversations, so to lighten the tone she asked what I was doing for fun. I got excited and told her I was watching a playthrough of DDLC, which was…
I stopped and realized how insane I was going to sound.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a game about madness, suicide, horror, and nihilism. It’s about wiping people from existence. It’s about manipulating people’s deepest, darkest desires. It’s about twisting love into horrifying parodies of itself. It’s about chipping away at reality until doubts begin to gnaw at your soul.
So why did the thought of sharing it with someone fill me with unironic, exuberant joy?
DDLC is different from horror games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Dead Space, where the excitement among gamers comes from the thrill of a good, scary time surrounded by blood and monsters. We know where we stand with those games—we’re the squishy victim in a universe made of razor blades, and the fun comes from surviving.
Dating sims are not that. There are no sharp edges in them, because dating sims are meant to be dollhouses where the player is in control, and all the characters exist only to titillate and excite them. The fun comes from forgetting (for a while) that this is a game and losing ourselves in the fantasy. There have been some fucked-up dating sims (e.g,, the murderous professor in the infamous fever dream called Hatoful Boyfriend), but the vast majority of them play upon the knowledge that the player is here for some light, romantic fun. It’s hard to find a more ephemeral genre than the dating sim.
…which makes it doubly disturbing when you play through DDLC and start watching the game break down all the comfortable walls between you and the game. Then the chilling realization hits you: DDLC isn’t just three steps ahead, it’s gotten so far ahead of you that it’s been patiently waiting for you to catch on from the beginning.
But that kind of detached, cerebral appreciation for a well-crafted story isn’t what I felt. I doubt it’s what anyone felt their first time, because even as the game breaks the fourth wall again (and again [and again]), the emotional core of the game comes from truly caring about the characters, even after you acknowledge (in your mind) that they’re all fictional. I cared about Sayori and genuinely, genuinely wanted to help her, just like I wanted to show Yuri that she could be herself and help Natsuki become more comfortable with the idea that someone could be her friend.
DDLC doesn’t provoke a golf clap from those who play it, even after all the tricks are revealed. It provokes a white-knuckled fear, a creeping anxiety that breaks into wide-eyed, nihilistic emptiness deep down in your soul.
So I return to my original question, and the strange position I found myself in when Skyping with my Ma: if Doki Doki Literature Club is a truly disturbing nightmare of a game, why did I feel so much joy at the prospect of talking about it? Where did this sense of life-affirming exuberance come from?
I think there’s an argument for catharsis, that playing through a game that evokes such strong emotions is sort of like a release valve for all the stress, sadness, and anxiety we have pent up within us. For me, though, I think the answer is different—it has to do with gazing into the abyss.
I think there’s something wonderfully freeing about staring into the abyss, because the ultimate home of the abyss is within ourselves—that deep-rooted emptiness that we try to fill with things like careers, accomplishments, and pleasures. It becomes exhausting to keep fleeing from it and blocking it out, pretending that I really am all the things I present myself to be. When things threaten that image of myself, my instinct is to repair the damage before I lose everything and have to face the abyss, which has always been there. But if I’m being honest with myself, truly honest, I know that image of myself is a fabrication.
DDLC is about tearing away illusions: the characters, the gameplay, the plot are all fabrications, except for Monika (according to her). As Monika strips it all away, I’m forced to examine what was real: my feelings, my desires, my actions. Why did I act the way I did? Why did I feel the way I did? Why did I want to romance one character instead of another? And when it all comes crashing down, what kind of person am I? Everyone in DDLC loved me, even Monika, but only I know my thoughts. And as the game shifted, only I remain the same. Who am I?
Beneath all my desires and actions is the abyss.
I don’t imagine ‘the abyss’ to be an unavoidable force for entropy, lethargy, depression, and self-destruction. If anything, it’s the on part of myself that I think I need to understand better. After I’ve spent enough time gazing into the abyss, I gain a clearer perspective on life: I get a better sense of what’s important to me and what are just distractions or my own illusions (something Yuri deals with). After touching that immovable sense of nothingness at the core of my being, I feel free, even energized. It’s like I’ve let go of all the things that were weighing me down.
The feeling reminds me of two quotes. The first is from Jacob’s Ladder:
“If you’re afraid of dying, and you’re holdin’ on, you’ll see devils tearin’ your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freein’ you from the world. It all depends on how you look at it.”
I think undergoing the small ‘death’ that comes from touching upon the abyss does something like that: it frees you of the self-destructive things you’re holding onto and shows you that you don’t need them, and they don’t define you. At the same time, it illuminates the beautiful things in your life…only, you realize that every part of life suddenly seems beautiful. As Franz Kafka put it:
“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
Doki Doki Literature Club is a terrifying, disturbing game. It’s upsetting, sometimes even disgusting. But instead of doing all of that for the sake of shocking people, I feel like the game’s intent, as Yuri says, is to change the way we see the world, if even if it’s only a small change. I think it accomplished that for me. It changed the way I looked at stories, at life, and what is possible with writing.
This is my experience. Maybe other people felt the same way. As to its widespread popularity, I have this to say:
Anime and otaku culture have become synonymous with modern “internet” culture, which seems preoccupied with deconstruction, nihilism, and exploring the darkest depths of the human experience, all while maintaining an ironic, irreverent attitude. I think Doki Doki Literature Club speaks the language of the lonely young men and women who have invested more and more of their lives in an intangible world of video games, websites, and increasingly elaborate memes. These are the same people who embrace meaningless and absurdism while constantly pushing away the acknowledgement that they’re not happy with their lives and are escaping into fantasies rather than dealing with their problems.
DDLC tears down the comfortable, familiar fantasy of a Japanese dating sim and starts crossing over into reality, leaving the player nowhere to escape to or hide. You’re not playing an idealized avatar anymore, you’re you dealing with a situation that has spun out of control and left you heartbroken, frightened, or disturbed. In this sense, DDLC takes a fake experience (dating fictional anime girls) and creates a real one (reflection upon the nature of DDLC’s fantasy, and reflection upon oneself), all while giving a strong enough framework to make sense out of it all.
That unexpected encounter with reality is powerful, and I think it resonated with a lot of gamers. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the name of the ending song to the game is “Your Reality.”
