You look at your hideous reflection on the lake — she no longer comes to the surface.

A very short (~600 words), very experimental gothic horror retelling of The Little Mermaid. I just wanted to do some Twine-esque interactive fiction in Ren'Py, so don't expect too much from it.

There's one special ending if you read all of the 10 linked scenes.


Content warning

The game is mostly poetic and abstract, but it does include mentions of cannibalism and visual depictions of body horror. Please take care while playing!


Controls

On-screen controls: just touch/click the same buttons as the guides on the screen. In general dpad moves, (Ok) confirms and (Cancel) cancels.

Gamepad: buttons are in the same position as a standard gamepad, just follow the layout of the on-screen handheld.

Keyboard: arrow keys for navigation, Z for ok (Ok), X for cancel (Cancel), C for sparkles (Sparkles), Left Shift for menu (Menu), A and S are (L bumper) and (R bumper) bumpers respectively.

You can press F on the keyboard (Capture) to take a screenshot, or hold it to record a video.

You can press Berry (Q on the keyboard / Start on a gamepad) and select "Settings" -> "Controller & Sensors" to view/change the default keyboard and gamepad layout.


About the warp graph

I honestly didn't have time to play around with it too much, so the UI is not the most usable. Warp (Sparkles) takes you to any node you've already seen, so you can follow other links in that node. The top left has a "score" of currently seen nodes.

while arrow up and down just navigate between different links in the current node, (<-) will take you to the parent node of the current node, and (->) will take you to the first edge of the current node, which might be unintuitive.


Credits

Written/illustrated/coded by Niini

Music from Dova-Syndrome and allthingssound @ FreeSound

Press Berry (Q on the keyboard/Start on gamepad) and select "Legal notices" for the full credits.


Platform support

The game runs on a Kate Paper Lantern device with Kate OS 0.24 or higher. The emulator should run on any modern device and browser as long as you have at least a 1.8GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and a graphics card supporting OpenGL ES 3.1 (most things released after 2012 should meet these).

Note that due to missing APIs in Safari, the emulator does not yet work on iOS/Safari.

If you get video/display errors, try making sure that your graphics card supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and your browser is using hardware acceleration.


Source code

Source code will be available later in December (I need to clean up a few things).

Published 4 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(10 total ratings)
AuthorNiini
GenreInteractive Fiction
TagsBlack and White, Experimental, Gothic, Horror, Short
Average sessionA few minutes
LanguagesEnglish
InputsKeyboard, Mouse, Gamepad (any), Touchscreen