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What’s in the demo?
Well, mostly the first hour of the game - if you reach 100% done! You’ll be able to meet Abigail & explore a few rooms of Blackwood manor… and maybe gather some clues about the history. Don’t miss any hints, they’re all important in Goetia!
Demo is available for Mac & PC, in 2 languages: english & french.
Goetia is a point-and-click adventure game for PC, Mac and Linux – and, as in any adventure game, you’ll be seeking out clues, finding objects, and figuring out how to use or combine them in order to progress through the different areas, puzzles and encounters.
However, there is one major difference compared to other adventure games that you might be used to. In Goetia, you play the part of Abigail, the ghost of a young lady. And as a ghost, you can walk through walls and fly through ceilings, you can explore everywhere as you see fit. But… to manipulate objects, you’ll have to possess them, just like a real poltergeist would. And once you possess an object, you can’t pass through walls anymore.
The video below is a gameplay trailer, made out of actual gameplay footage.
- A 2D world of Victorian mystery.
- Over 90 rooms to explore.
- Five vast and diverse areas to discover - Blackwood Manor is surrounded by ruins, woods, caves and an abandoned village.
- A progressive-rock and ambient-inspired soundtrack.
- Use your ability to walk through walls in order to reach secret rooms and areas.
- Possess objects like a poltergeist to lift them, use them, combine them, make them float in the air, pile them up… well, you’re a ghost after all, behave like one!
- Solve puzzles in more than one way by discovering hidden rooms and special features, such as new ghostly powers.
- Delve into Blackwood’s story: 40 years have passed, and many things have changed since Abigail’s death.
- Feel free to explore! You can travel through the world of Goetia however you like - and if you get stuck, simply backtrack and explore another area.
If you walk among the ruins you can easily imagine what it was like. The small black dots of the Luftwaffe getting bigger by the minute. The whistling of the dive bombers approaching on that fateful day of February 1941. And if you touch the charred wood, you can even hear the warning calls and the waves of panic resonating through time.
And then again, maybe you’ll hear nothing at all. Maybe you’ll only feel the weight of the silence, broken only by the wind in the branches of old trees. Maybe you’ll only feel the weight of this unanswered question: could that fateful attack explain what happened here? Is it enough to explain why the whole population fled the village?
That’s when you look beyond the village limits, when you look up and see its shape: Blackwood Manor.
Behind its gates, the silence of Oakmarsh takes on a different taste. Icy, metallic, faint, swollen with secrets that won’t stand still. Blackwood. The name of a manor and the family that lived within. A perverted and mad lineage, a clan whose final members devoted their life to mysticism and fanatical experiments.
I am Abigail. Abigail Blackwood. Recently risen from the grave, I know nothing about the last 40 years of my family’s history... But obviously somebody is keen on seeing me lift the veil on what happened in Oakmarsh - to what led to the downfall of Blackwood Manor.
And it seems like I have no choice in the matter…
The Blackwood family name goes back through English history for generations – a family driven by curiosity. Knowledge, thought and excellence were the pillars of education, and no boy or girl born in Blackwood Manor could avoid them.
Abigail was no exception, and was raised at the end of the 19th century by her father and her governess, following the precepts laid out by the family’s proud traditions. And over time, with each passing generation, the thirst for knowledge meant that everything became worth studying… even the most unusual and controversial branches of ‘science.’
When Abigail died in 1902 she had no idea she would return, 39 years later, to her childhood manor. Initially confused by her spectral appearance, she is now seeking answers in the old house and its surroundings.
It is 1941. War is raging, and Blackwood Manor lies empty. Abigail’s parents and sister are missing, and the air is filled with anxiety and anger. Who is living here now? What happened to everyone? Why has Abigail come back from the dead? And what is this Goetia that seems to be the key to understanding all this nonsense?
With Goetia, we wanted to bring back two things: the satisfaction you feel when solving a challenging puzzle, plus the excitement of unravelling dark mysteries as you progress through the story.
But we also wanted to create a slightly different experience as well – something fresh. In a traditional point-and-click game you progress in a pretty linear fashion, from one puzzle to the next, unlocking bits of storyline as you do so. The story is out of your hands and you are but an actor in it.
In Goetia, we wanted to put the focus on world exploration. You are encouraged to roam around, discover places, discover their puzzles, leave, come back to them later - all as you see fit. And also, don’t forget that you’re playing the game as a disembodied ghost, which that means you won’t be interacting with the world as beings of flesh-and-blood would.
So here are a few features that will change the way you play :
No inventory
An intangible ghost doesn’t have a backpack… So how can she grab objects and save them for later? Well it’s simple: she can’t! Instead of a classic inventory system, we imagined a way to move objects by possessing them, which means you will become the object you want to take with you, until you release it and let it fall to the ground.
We’re sure you’ve always dreamed of being a candle holder.
A wall? What wall?
A ghost isn’t deterred by mere physical barriers like walls or ceilings. You don’t have a key for a specific door? Not a problem. Float through it. Or through the ceiling, or through the floor. Find rooms a mere mortal couldn’t reach and explore places hidden from others. That is, until you need to bring an object to that room…
Indeed, once you possess an object, you lose your intangibility and your movement becomes limited by physical obstacles. This should make exploration a bit more interesting.
You will play at two different levels:
- As a ghost, you will explore the manor, the forest or the village to look for clues.
- As a possessed object, you can interact with your environment – combine what you possess with another item, or simply use it, throw it, or move it around.
Choose your path
There are four distinct zones to explore in Goetia, in addition to Blackwood Manor itself.
After a short introduction to the story, you’ll soon be able to leave the house and choose where you want to start your quest for answers. Will you start in an abandoned village, in a dark pine forest, in a strange labyrinth or in a cave network?
As you progress, if you don’t find the solution to a given puzzle, feel free to backtrack any time you like, and try solving another enigma.
Alternate puzzle solutions
Some special/optional powers will be hidden in the manor and its surroundings. These powers will allow you, for example, to see an object owner’s last thoughts and actions when you possess it. Sometimes this will only be some insight into the story or the protagonists. Other times, it will give you a clue, allowing you to discover an alternate (and easier) way to solve a particular enigma. But beware, these powers will be hard to find.
Two heads lead our team: Moeity, a digital artist, and Sushee, a french game studio & all its workers, a 3-year experienced team who develop advert & serious games for international clients. With Goetia, based on Moeity’s original idea & design, Sushee is leading its first own project - it was time to gather all this experience & make it personal!
Let’s see who we have:
@ Sushee
Benjamin: game designer and project director
Samuel: lead developer
Benoît: developer
Julien: developer
Terence: animator
Emilie: animator
@ Moeity
Moeity: graphic designer & author
Lucie: writer
Written by Norway-based artist Sombering Sail, Goetia's music is a blend of ambient and folk music with elements of progressive rock. He is highly influenced by bands such as Anathema, Tool, Porcupine Tree or Opeth.
Listen to a sample of the full OST here:
Six workers at the studio, an author & designer and a writer… Eight people who will be focusing on completing development of Goetia in the coming months. We have more content to add, new rooms to create and new puzzles for you to solve… not to mention story-writing and animation. Those are all the main tasks for the current team.
Whatever happens, we will produce this game – it’s a big passion for our team, and we can’t wait for you to experience the story and world. But we know that, thanks to your support, we would be able to go further.
It’s about material support, of course, that could help us to add new members to our team – not just in terms of content polish, but things like localisation and QA, so that we can bring the game to the widest audience in the best shape possible.
But the other thing we’re super-passionate about is the opportunity to listen to your feedback – to find out what you're excited about, and hear your ideas for improvements when playing the demo!
While Sushee has developed a number of projects in the past three years for other high-profile companies and IP – including a range of games across different genres and platforms - Goetia is Sushee’s first original project, so there is a degree of learning that we’re making about releasing our own game. However, the studio is well used to working to deadlines for clients.
Meanwhile, although Moeity isn’t experienced in videogame creation as such, he is a senior web designer for his own clients & works on many personal projects based on photomanipulation. He designed all the scenery in Goetia, and boasts a prodigious work rate! Almost all of the decor is completed - although of course you will only be able to see part of it in the demo.
We have been working with Square Enix on our pitch, and this project first appeared on the Collective platform (a special spotlight designed to help indies with visibility on ideas) last year. Gamers there voted strongly in its favour, and since then – in order for Square Enix to officially support our Kickstarter campaign – we passed a Team Assessment, the full report of which is available here: http://sushee.fr/goetia/assessment.pdf
Thanks to Square Enix and some friends, we were also able to find a publisher very supportive of indie games in France, Ynnis interactive, which decided to come on board and help us with marketing, distribution and publishing of the game.
The game demo was revealed during the European Indie Game Day last December – and we were really happy (and encouraged!) that it won the Artistic award.
Finally, choosing the tech on which to make the game was a challenge, but in the end we decided to Unity 3D, a powerful tool that the team has mastered. The game architecture is almost complete, and the physics engine is functional.
Thanks for your support!
Risks and challenges
Please check the "Risk and Challenges" part above.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterSupport
Funding period
- (30 days)