Press materials

Short description

The Secret of Vallescura is a gothic point-and-click comedy set in a town on the Oregon coast, built on top of a pit of Hell. Klem, a cowardly and courteous demon, arrives on the wrong night: a hundred-year-old contract is about to come due, and the collector is already in town.

Long description

The Secret of Vallescura is a classic graphic adventure: nine verbs, an inventory, sixty locations drawn in code, and a town that answers only when questioned. The DNA is Monkey Island and Fate of Atlantis, run through Dante's Inferno and a public counter open after midnight.

Klem is a loose-skinned demon: cowardly, polite, with a name he earned one favour at a time. He came to Vallescura for the Tuesday poker game. He found a curfew nobody signed, a chasm nobody will name, and a gentleman with a crooked crown collecting rent on the night itself.

Under the town there is a Hellmouth, and under it there is an archive. Hell, in Vallescura, is not fire and pitchforks: it is a counter open after midnight, a stamp, a form, and a clerk who addresses you formally while taking your name away. One rule holds the whole thing up, and it cannot be worked around: Hell takes nothing that has not been signed over to it.

The game moves between investigation, chained puzzles, insult duels, rituals and an unreasonable amount of infernal paperwork. Characters remember what you did. The streets change tone as the night wears on. And there are ten hidden kittens, because in a town like this somebody has to look after the cats.

Everything on screen is drawn in code: there is not a single background bitmap, nor a sprite on disk. The game will run in the browser, saves itself every room and asks for no installation.

Features

• Classic nine-verb point-and-click adventure with inventory and object combinations
• Sixty locations drawn in code and 561 interactive elements
• Three acts, two interlocking investigation paths and three distinct endings
• Characters who remember your choices and shift register accordingly
• Insult duels, rituals, minigames and infernal bureaucracy
• Ten hidden kittens to find
• Vector art generated in code: no sprites, no background bitmaps
• Will run in the browser, with autosave every room