This blog has been pretty dead for awhile, and a big reason for that has been all the work I’ve been putting into my latest game with Woodsy Studio, Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament.

The Last Sacrament is a follow up to Echoes of the Fey: The Fox’s Trail, which we released two years ago on PC and last year on PS4/Xbox One.  It’s a sequel of sorts, though we designed each installment in the series to be playable all on its own. You play as Sofya Rykov, a private detective in a fantasy (vaguely steampunk, without the Victorian elements) world of magic, Elves, and so on. The idea of blending detective and fantasy fiction is one I’ve wanted to play around with for awhile, and Echoes of the Fey finally gave me a good excuse. We’ve also deliberately tried to develop a fantasy world that is different from most, specifically trying to avoid the way fantasy typically embraces the bad gender/sexual politics of the real world when it doesn’t have to.  

In The Last Sacrament, Sofya is blackmailed into a dangerous job to steal the ingredients of a sacred religious rite from the powerful Krovakyn Church. But that’s not her only job. She’s also been hired to protect the Emperor’s daughter (who happens to be her former childhood sweetheart) from would-be assassins during a visit to the border.

The Last Sacrament is a much bigger game on a more complicated engine. A year and a half ago, we moved from Gamemaker Studio to Unreal Engine 4, which prompted us to (basically) remake all of our assets and environments in 3d. That’s been a lot of work! So has designing a tabletop RPG inspired mini-game, RiftRealms, to break up the visual novel-style sections. But the game is now done and out on Steam!