Raven's Eye
In development
An interactive storybook and horror mystery set in Ravenshore, Rhode Island, in 1920.
Background & Story
It is 1920.
You arrive in the coastal town of Ravenshore as a physician, brought to the waterfront to examine dockworkers suffering from a strange illness. They complain of weakness, exhaustion, and a feeling that seems to worsen as evening approaches. There is no obvious cause.
Then you begin to feel it too.
Ravenshore is an old working port, a town of fishing boats, warehouses, narrow streets, prosperous families and people who have spent their lives watching ships come and go. Most residents have perfectly reasonable explanations for what is happening. Bad air from the harbor. Exhaustion. The evening mist.
Others look toward the hills.
Outside town stands Raven's Eye, the mansion built by the wealthy Keller family. Three years earlier, in 1917, something happened there. The household died or disappeared, and the estate was abandoned.
Yet every night, the Eye in the mansion's tower continues to glow.
People have tried to reach the house since. Some turned back. Some returned confused or terrified. Others never returned at all. Eventually Ravenshore stopped sending people after them.
"People stopped dying up there?"
"No. We stopped going up there to collect the bodies."
The people of Ravenshore do not agree about what any of this means. Some dismiss the stories. Some know pieces of the Keller family's history. Others remember suspicious shipments, old scandals, strange behavior, or people who worked for the family and were better left alone. A few believe the sickness spreading through the town has something to do with the light in the tower.
No one has the whole story.
Finding it means talking to people, comparing what they say, following old histories and present-day clues, and eventually making a deliberate decision to leave Ravenshore behind and enter the woods.
Raven's Eye is waiting there.
And it is not empty.
Features
Play It Your Way
Raven's Eye is designed around two presentation styles. Both contain the same story, puzzles, characters, consequences and difficulty.
Traditional Mode strips the experience down to text. No room graphics. No live map. No interactive highlighting. If you want to play Raven's Eye as an old-school, text-only adventure, you can play the entire game that way.
Modern Mode presents the same game with its full visual interface, including directional room artwork, a real-time local map, optional interactive highlighting and special illustrated inserts for important characters, objects, discoveries, supernatural events and deaths.
A World That Remembers
Characters are not information kiosks waiting for the correct question.
They have their own knowledge, beliefs, prejudices, relationships and secrets. They can remember meaningful things you have done. They may trust you, dislike you, misunderstand you, lie to you, refuse to help or decide that they have had quite enough of you.
How you treat people can change what becomes possible later.
No single character knows everything, so solving the mystery means comparing testimony with documents, physical evidence and what you discover for yourself.
Explore, Investigate and Experiment
Move through Ravenshore, the mansion and the places beneath it. Examine rooms from different directions. Search behind paintings. Read documents. Study bodies. Manipulate old machinery. Find concealed mechanisms and hidden routes.
Rooms can change as events unfold. Characters can move. Something overlooked earlier may become important after you learn more.
The game accepts traditional commands such as open door or look behind portrait, while also recognizing a range of more natural phrasing.
A Live Map
In Modern Mode, the local map grows with your exploration. It can show your current location and facing direction, rooms you have visited, discovered exits, blocked routes and secrets only after you have actually found them.
Navigation is there to support the mystery, not become one.
Artwork That Is Part of the Story
Room graphics change with your viewing direction, allowing you to turn and examine important spaces visually as well as through text.
Special insert images can appear when something deserves closer attention: a person, an object, a discovery, a death, or something considerably less easy to explain.
The text experience remains complete without them.
Consequences Without Dead Ends
Choices can matter. Relationships can be damaged. Opportunities can be lost. You can make mistakes.
You can also die.
Raven's Eye uses authored death scenes, saves and hidden checkpoints so that experimentation is encouraged rather than punished. Important discoveries normally have more than one route, so angering the wrong person does not automatically make the game impossible to finish.
A Smaller World With More Inside It
Raven's Eye is being built as a focused 5 to 8 hour story, emphasizing atmosphere, exploration, conversation, mystery and carefully authored detail rather than an enormous map filled for its own sake.
The goal is not to give you a thousand rooms.
It is to make you wonder what is behind the next door.
Want to know when it's ready? Email us at info@nightotter.com.