Lovecraftian horror and interactive fiction have a long history, from the 1998 text adventure Anchorhead to the charming creepiness of Fallen London. Tiny Bull Studios’ Omen Exitio: Plague continues that legacy, both of the horror of the dreadful unknown and of the gamebook, presenting players with myriad choices to make, stats to manage, and nightmares to confront.
Dr. Jake Huntington is following in the wake of unknown disease across Zanzibar in the 1890s, a journey that soon descends into places beyond sanity and reality. Prose and illustrations, presented with the aesthetic of aged journal, describe the dangerous adventure, offering you choices along the way. Your version of Jack has a number of skills that define success or failure in various situations – Fighting, Observation, Medicine, Agility, Speechcraft – which, combined with the weapons and equipment in your inventory, can take you down different narrative branches.
But your decisions affect more than just the direct path of the story. Your sanity is an ever-present concern looming over the story (as expected in any Lovecraftian tale) and this can influence how your companions react to you and how you can react to choices. Your stats play a role as well; being very observant might make you notice more details…but of course knowing more eldritch knowledge is usually not healthy for one’s well-being.
Omen Exitio: Plague is available for $ 11.99 on Steam, and is expected to release soon on iOS and Android. For more details on Omen Exitio and developer Tiny Bull, you can visit the game’s site, Twitter, and Facebook.
