#among the haunted

[aurelim]

Among the Haunted Release!!

Happy Halloween everyone! For the past few weeks, I have been working on a collaboration with @albywritesfiction (who is one of the best people I have ever worked with; they have helped me so much with proofreading, coding, and looking for images 🥺 thank you so much!!) to make a game for Halloween.

The game has been submitted to ECTOCOMP English version (Le Grand Guignol) and Cozy Halloween Jam, so go check it out!

And so, Aurie and Alby bring you...

Being a single parent is never easy, especially when you have two kids to raise. You also live in a haunted house, where the supernatural inhabit the same space as the place you are meant to call home. Both of these factors equal chaos, which leads you to the present.

It is Halloween. Live through the spooky day on 13 Hallows Lane and decide what you will do when the sun begins to set and trick-or-treat goers fill the sidewalks.

What will you do? Decorate your house? Play some pranks on poor trick-o-treaters with help from the ghosts within your walls? Attend to your children to make sure they do not tell anyone that your house is haunted? The choice is yours!

​​Warning: this game has mentions of blood, ghosts, spiders and clowns, as well as disturbing themes. Please proceed with caution.

🎃 FEATURES

Mainly a linear game with some route differences based on your choices. Are they good? Are they bad? Who knows.

Choose your first name, your children's names (a boy and girl), and what they call you! However, you are locked in a preset personality, so you cannot change how you react to situations.

Live through your first Halloween at your haunted house, which is full of kind monsters and creatures you never thought existed until you met them.

Encounter strange things in your neighborhood.

🍭 CREDITS

Thanks to @writing-prompt-s for the following prompt: "You live in a very haunted house, but it’s not that bad. The voices in the basement remind you of your laundry and tell you to check the boiler, the rat size talking spider keeps the pests away and is a pretty good therapist, and the victorian ghost children are great friends with your kids."

Special thanks as well to Ash, author of Inner Demons, for some UI inspiration from her Twine/Sugarcube 2 Template (especially for the button CSS!)

And of course, thank you so much to Alby for helping with editing, coding, and helping me with advice! AtH couldn't have asked for a better guardian spirit ;)

All images came from Unsplash and were found by Alby. Banner and game cover made on Canva.

Check out the game here: GAME!

[albywritesfiction]

Among the Haunted: Behind the Scenes

Hi everyone!

@aurelim and I had a great time making Among the Haunted these past few weeks, as evidenced by the following screenshots:

We also talked about other things aside from AtH 😄 Here's us talking about the map bot from Five Nights at Freddy's:

We also had the revelation of Aurie's true nature ...

... as well as the birth of my new nickname

It was, indeed, a downward spiral of ghost references

There were a lot more, but these were some of our favorite moments 😊

Hope you all had as much fun going through this behind-the-scenes post as we did making Among the Haunted, and Happy Halloween!

[twinegardening]

Among the Haunted, by aurelim

Celebrate Halloween as a single parent living in a haunted house.

Being a single parent is never easy, especially when you have two kids to raise. You also live in a haunted house, where the supernatural inhabit the same space as the place you are meant to call home. Both of these factors equal chaos, which leads you to the present. It is Halloween. Live through the spooky day on 13 Hallows Lane and decide what you will do when the sun begins to set and trick-or-treat goers fill the sidewalks. What will you do? Decorate your house? Play some pranks on poor trick-o-treaters with help from the ghosts within your walls? Attend to your children to make sure they do not tell anyone that your house is haunted? The choice is yours!

[manonamora-if-reviews]

Among the Haunted by aurelim and Alby

IFDB - Game

Summary: What will you do on the day of Halloween? Decorate your house? Play some pranks on poor trick-o-treaters with help from the ghosts within your walls? Attend to your children to make sure they do not tell anyone that your house is haunted? The choice is yours!

This was a collaboration project between two authors of different styles, where a cosy slice-of-life and horror mash up was attempted.

There are indeed some horror elements to this game, especially at the start and towards the end of the story, but I found them being muddled through the rest of the text, its gripping effect drowned in lengthy passages and passive interaction, diluting the tension and fast pace. By the end, the horror aspect resembled more a list of references weaved through the quirky slice-of-life concept.

Granted, mixing up genres, especially when they are so different, is pretty difficult. But I can't help but wonder how it would have looked like if the writing focused more on the slice-of-life or more on the horror rather than make both genre work on the same level. The concept of a single mom with two kids trying to survive Halloween is already a neat concept, adding the cookie haunted house they live in adds to the charm, but I fail to see how the murder clown would fit in there. On the other hand, if the horror aspect was taken further, the single mom having to deal with a haunted house on Halloween was already a solid plot!

I think more interactivity and player agency would have greatly helped the game in general. There are many instances in the game where you go through multiple lengthy passages, with only a click-to-continue link, pulling the reader through the story, rather than making it an active participant*. It is a bit of a shame, especially as the blurb sets expectations of choices with decorating the house, or going trick-or-treating, or pulling a prank... While you have some small choices, the bigger aspects happen without requiring the player. I would have loved to be able to** place particular decorations in specific places (which could affect the prank later on), or choosing a different costume to go trick-or-treating (rather than that one or nothing), or responding to passers-by/candy-givers during the trick-or-treat phase. The added agency for the player would have helped with the pace of the story (and potentially added to the horror aspect - oh, but what if I had chosen another path...) *even if the PC is supposed to have a set personality, many of the choices made for you could have been interactive. **most of those don't require more than an extra line or two of variation in the text.

One final gripe with the accessibility of the game itself: when the passage has an image for the background, the text is often very hard to read, even when a dark-ish overlay has been added. Either the dark overlay needs to be darker/less opaque, or the image should be less bright (a combination of both would be best).

One thing that I noticed however, was how the prose and style stayed consistent throughout the writing, even with the switch in tone and genre. This is pretty impressive considering the writers have quite different styles. This speaks volume about the synergy during the creating process.

[dykobra-kid]

"Hold the hand of the god-child”, they said, "as he falls from the sky"

Lyrics from That Unwanted Animal by The Amazing Devil

[macksartblock]

Hi welcome to snippets and doodles of what’s been plaguing me for well over a week

[moonshynecybin]

Marc Marquez and Valentino Rossi together at the 2019 British Grand Prix

[ourhouseishaunted]

trips and dozens of shitty sketches of trigun women fall out of my pockets

[souenkun]

Is anyone ever curious about why the house that takashi's parents owned was never taken over by any youkai, even when it has been abandoned for years, when this series has given us plenty examples of youkai inhabiting a human's dwelling, whether there were still humans living there or not (and either because they like the house, or they just want to mess with humans)? I do wonder if this is relevant to the main plot in some way (like the natsume family name being a ward on its own, hence youkai naturally avoided takashi's parents' house as a result, or if someone had set up wards when the house was built that are still up and functioning to this date, in which case, the question is who would go to that length to protect the natsume family)?

[schneiderenjoyer]

The game reaching its first year shouldn't make me tear up, man...

[toxic-glamour]

why is there something so inherently queer about being a Japanese horror game protagonist?

like, what are you scared of? coming out?

[armandyke]

Some major hits and some major misses amongst these ones

21) Thirteen Storeys by Jonathan Sims (5⭐)

5 Stars no notes. 

This was great. I don’t have a lot else to say to be honest. It’s sort of like a horror portmanteau in book form. We get thirteen stories which could all individually be stand alones (although as we go through we start to see things interconnecting) from different people living in or connected to this big tower block who all experience some kind of paranormal activity, with it all eventually culminating in the final story where all the characters are brought together. We know going into the book that whatever is happening is going to culminate in the death of the billionaire who owns the building and lives in the rooftop penthouse, and the story is about the build up to that final climax. Fundamentally it’s about class divide, worker exploitation, and the sacrifices the rich are happy to make to stay getting richer. Eat the rich, basically. It’s really, really good. I gave it 5 stars. Definitely check it out. 

Also as a side note I just really appreciate that the back pages give credit to everybody involved in the book production. Editors, cover designers, marketing team, everything. I just think that’s really cool and I wish more authors did this.

22) Nod by Adrian Barnes (4⭐)

This was a really cool concept and also very simple. One day, everybody around the world, with the exception of a small handful of people, stops sleeping. Like it’s so simple but is that not one of the most horrifying things you can imagine? 

The story follows Paul, one of the few people still able to sleep, as he witnesses the rapid breakdown in society as insanity starts to set in amongst those who can’t sleep, including his wife, Tanya. There’s not a lot more that I can say without giving too much of the book away, but just know that if you’re a fan of creepy cults, you’ll probably enjoy this. And as a person who has battled with insomnia before, this was both fun and terrifying in equal measures. 

I gave this 4 stars. It’s quite a quick read, I think I read most of it on a train journey to somewhere. Would have liked to explore the whole cult more, but the whole book is only set across 24 days so I get why it’s a little on the shorter side. 

23) How to sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix (5⭐)

This is a little gem of a book. I’m not going to go too much into what happens because the synopsis on the back is also quite vague, and I think part of the joy of this one is not really knowing what the hell is going to happen next. 

To give as brief a summary as possible, our main character, Louise, gets the news that her parents have died, and has to return to her hometown to sell her childhood home, all while furiously butting heads with her younger brother, Mark. It’s a horror story,and it’s very creepy, but at its heart it’s a really beautiful story about grief and generational trauma. Really well done, really beautiful, I gave it 5 stars and I highly highly recommend giving it a read. I’ll definitely be picking up more books by this author in the future. 

24) Among the Living by Tim Lebbon (2⭐)

Taking a sharp and veering downhill plummet, we have this book. This book pissed me off. I’m not really sure how to go about explaining why it pissed me off without spoiling things.

The premise of this book is that two groups of people: a team of cavers searching for rare, valuable minerals, and a group of environmental activists trying to stop the mining, find themselves completely stranded in the middle of an arctic island after discovering that a cave which has recently been uncovered from under the thawing ice was harbouring an ancient, deadly, contagious disease. Good premise. Horrific circumstances in an isolated snowy setting. 

Again, I’m trying to think of a way to explain my beef with this book without giving the whole thing away but… let’s just say this book promised something and then never delivered on it. There’s no suspense in this book because at all times we are explicitly aware of who is infected and who isn’t, and you keep expecting the story to throw a curveball and reveal that there’s another infected member of the group, or, if you wanted to go even darker, that they just killed someone who wasn’t infected at all, but it just… never does? I don’t know, it was very bizarre. I gave it 2 stars because even though it pissed me off, I liked the concept and the actual infection itself was really cool and gross to read about. Honestly you could probably write the worst book of all time but if it has good gore in it I’ll probably still give it a pity star. 

25) 19 Claws and a Black Bird by Augustina Bazterrica (3⭐)

This is another short story collection, it got my standard 3 stars. I picked it up because these were all written by the author of Tender is the Flesh, which I really enjoyed last year. 

The stories are very short, like, some of them are literally just a page, and… they’re fine. They’re alright. None of them massively stood out to me but none of them were bad either. It was a bit of a letdown after Tender is the Flesh because that book got such a visceral reaction from me, and I think maybe that hindered my enjoyment of this book a bit because I’d set the bar so high in my own head. That and the fact that both the author blurbs and the synopsis on the back cover talk at length about how brutal and gorey these stories are when, for me, there was really nothing that shocking in there. But don’t get it twisted, this was still a fun read. The way she writes horror is so fresh and creative, and I really love her writing style. The stories in here are really interesting and unique, just nothing that hit me in my chest the same way her novel did. It won’t stop me from instantly grabbing anything with her name on the cover in the future though. 

26) House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson (4.5⭐)

Rejoice, for we have reached the toxic yuri horror. I really loved this, I don’t know what more to tell you. I had an absolute blast reading this. 

The story is set in a world where rich, powerful families (houses, as they’re known) supposedly maintain their health through regular consumption of blood, which they get from their bloodmaids. The bloodmaids are women hired under a contract of so many years to live in the house, be fed and cared for, and have blood regularly taken for the head of the house to drink, then, once their contract is over, they’re given a massive pension and allowed to live out the rest of their life in luxury. Sexy stuff. At the beginning of the book our main character, Marion, applies for a position as a bloodmaid for Countess Lisavet, the heir of the House of Hunger. But when she arrives she notices that strange things are afoot as bloodmaids keep disappearing. 

It’s really good. The characters, including the side characters, are really well fleshed out and nuanced. The story is really good with a lot of twists and turns that I didn’t see coming. There’s blood letting and lesbian sex, need I go on? At times the writing was a little sloppy and could have done with some final editing, but nothing that ruined the reading experience for me. I gave it 4.5 stars. 

27) Song of Kali by Dan Simmons (DNF)

I read 36% of this book and then gave up, for two reasons. 

Number 1: This book is set in Kolkata, and it’s specifically about a white guy travelling to Kolkata to do some journalism or something, I don’t really remember. But the way every single brown person this guy sees or interacts with is described just gave me the ick. And, as you can imagine, he sees a lot of brown people! That and the way the city in general is described. I’m no expert, but it didn’t feel good when I was reading it. 

Number 2: It was fucking boring. 36% of the way through and literally nothing had fucking happened. We got one scene where a guy was explaining some human sacrifice ritual he witnessed, but beyond that it was literally just this white dude sitting in various meetings. Like, my brother in Christ, if I wanted to read about some guys meeting minutes I would get an office job. Can we please be for real? 

So, yeah, this was dogshit, in my personal opinion. That’s my review. 

28) The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Perry (DNF)

This is the one that was technically a DNF but not really, and what I mean by that is that by about 60% of the way through reading this, I got impatient and basically just skipped ahead to the final chapters to see if I’d correctly guessed who the killer was. I had, just for the record. 

My issue with this book is that it could have been half the length. We spend chapter after chapter after chapter going round and round in circles waiting for the characters to come to very obvious conclusions. Like, if I said to you that this book involves the suspicious deaths of several women, one, a sex worker who had just requested a large sum of money and expressed her intentions to flee the city before her death, and another, a maid who had apparently run away from home, are there any possible theories already jumping into your head? Because for me at least, I was thinking this is probably some back alley abortion method gone wrong literally after reading the first chapter. When I tell you at 60% through this book our main characters had just reached that same conclusion. Fucking hell. 

Anyway, even though I did read the ending, I skipped over about 35% to get there, so I’m still counting it as a DNF. 

29) A House with Good Bones by T.Kingfisher (5⭐)

Another T.Kingfisher number that, to the shock of nobody by this point in my life, got 5 stars from me. I think I might be in love with this woman. T.Kingfisher if you’re out there… Should I do a video just about her books? I’ve read five now, another one of which is coming up later in this list. Let me know if you wanna hear me wax lyrical about her writing for an hour. 

Anyway, this story is about Sam, a sort of bug archeologist type person, who has moved back to her mother’s home for a few months. When she gets there, however, she finds that her mother has restored almost everything back to the way it was when the house belonged to her dead grandmother. She seems constantly paranoid and on edge, and there’s a lot of weird shit afoot involving ladybirds and grandma’s precious rose garden. It’s exactly the kind of whimsical horror with loveable characters and unsettling body horror that I expect from Kingfisher’s books at this point, and, yeah, as I said, I really loved it. This one has some good exploration of generational trauma, which you might have noticed by now is something I seem to gravitate to in my books. If my therapist is watching this right now, don’t even worry about it. 

30) A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock (5⭐)

Oh my god. If you know, you know. This book altered my brain chemistry and changed me fundamentally as a person. It’s gorgeous. I can’t even really put into words why I loved it so much, it just felt like it was written specifically to scratch every itch in my neurodivergent brain. Uh, it’s signed. You know it’s serious when the author says you’re passionate. We have a fun parasocial relationship on twitter where he retweets my art and I think to myself that we should be best friends but anyway, we’re not talking about me. 

The actual story is about two men, Gregor, a botanist, and Simon, a taxidermist, who wind up combining their skills to create, you guessed it, a botanical daughter. I do love a sentient fungus, and if you’ve read and enjoyed T.Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead you’ll probably love this and vice versa. God, it’s so hard to give a concise summary without just waxing lyrical for a few hours. I’ll probably make a video just to yap about this book at some point. But in a nutshell, it’s gay, it’s toxic, the plant girl is a lesbian, it’s funny but also beautiful, it’s found family, there’s good gore, a man gets his face ripped off. What more can I say? The writing style might not be for everyone but like, that could not be me. If you use the word “squelched” as a verb that is like the equivalent of proposing marriage to me. So Noah Medlock if you’re reading this (and he may well be because we’re basically best friends on twitter) my answer is yes. 

Favourite book of the year bar none.

[therain-lover]

Do not blink. Do not think to hard. Do not wake up (wake up). You do not know what you are, (you have forgotten) you do not want to know. (Keep dreaming)

More design notes v

Very cagey about showing skin (he may or may not remember what his face looks like…), which could feasibly be described as porcelain or paper-like. His fingertips are permanently stained with redstone.

Bdubs swears the angel features are new… but as far as anyone can really remember, he’s always looked like that. 👀

[skyfullofpods]

There's a non-zero amount of ✨denial✨in response to certain podcast-based events this week, as I bring you my thoughts about the fiction podcasts I've been listening to in this week's audio fiction Sunday blog post!

[fishpastetheconfusing]

A house i designed for a family of paranormal investigators (which i also designed) in isometric perspective

I hid an amongus in the interior

[whitewaterpaper]

Den som väntar på något gott väntar aldrig för länge. @kulturdasset lär bli mäkta imponerad av några av månadens filmval. Det är klart. Värt att vänta på vad det också. 😜

65 (2023) [👍] Riktigt bra SF om en utomjording som hamnar på jorden under dinosauriernas regim.

Australiens (2014) [👎🆓] En budgetstinkare från Australien. Går på komisk knock men svingar vilt i luften.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) [👍🔁]

Grease Live! (2016) [👍🎭🔁]

Hairspray Live! (2016) [👍🎭🔁]

Hocus Pocus 2 (2023) [👍🔁]

Kapten Våghals / Captain Scarlett (1952) [🆓] Intressant, och mot alla odds, kombination av Robin Hood och Röda Nejlikan. Hollywood! Vi vill ha en remake franchise!

Lair, the (2022) [__] Neil Marshall, åter i samarbete med Charlotte Kirk, och precis som i The Reckoning inte dåligt men når heller inte riktigt ända fram.

Lost City, the (2022) [👍🔁]

Love of Three Queens / L'amante di Paride (1954) [👎🆓] Spretigt sömnpiller med Hedy Lamarr.

Mord i Venedig / A Haunting in Venice (2023) [👎] När jag tänker tillbaka till Kenneth Branagh föregående exkursion som Poirot (Döden på Nilen, 2020) kommer beskrivningen ”välpolerad yta och dyra färger” för mig. Men vad gör man inte för Michelle Yeoh liksom?

Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, the (1957) [🔁🆓] Vikingraffel signerat Roger Corman. Den här hade jag tydligen sett tidigare... Ett upptäckt som är ett omdöme i sig.

Ski Troop Attack (1960) [🆓] Skidåkarraffel signerat Roger Corman, han har verkligen fått till det i den här filmen. Om oinspirerat sidåkar-pang-pang är vad man längtar efter. Jag tror storyn tog en annan nedfart, för den minns jag inte mycket av.

Totally Killer (2023) [👍] Hallå, hej! Amazon får till en underhållande liten skräckkomedi som andas klassiska grepp och tillbaka till framtiden. Me like! Kommer antagligen ses igen.

Vidioten / UHF (1989) [__] Idag kanske mer ett underhållande tidsdokument om tiden innan YouTube gjorde videostjärnor av svenssons.

WarGames (1983) [👍🔁] Idag, i skuggan av AI kanske ännu mer aktuell än någonsin. Står fortfarande stadigt utan behov av remakes. Lekte med tanken att se uppföljaren, tills jag såg att den bara fanns på hyr-tjänsterna.

@kulturdasset lär börja drägla över husguden Neil Marshalls senaste, hen bör dock trycka på play där med något nedskruvade förväntningar. Resten tycker jag skall ge Totally Killer eller Kapten Våghals en chans. Den senare är kanske inte A-klassad underhållning, men väl värd en chans.

För den nyfikne med ett sug efter en utmaning såg jag the Reckoning i februari 2021.