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Nothing says romance like the threat of imminent death – whether for your crush or whoever you’re targeting for your next kill.
Grave Seasons is the first game from Perfect Garbage Studios, which I tried at Summer Game Fest last year with a brief look at the cozy, Stardew Valley-like farming game with a serial killer running amok. This year SGFI took a second look at a new demo that revealed a lot about how the game’s most terrifying mechanics work to investigate and prevent future deaths.
Naturally, fans of the upcoming game, published by Blumhouse Games and scheduled for release later this year, are clamoring for more than just killing. So I asked narrative director Emmett Nahill everything he could share about what it’s like to date villagers in Grave Seasons — and yes, that includes having an affair with the killer.
After more than half an hour of play, and a few hours into the game, the second demo revealed more about how Grave Seasons works. As previously known, it’s not a single-player story – you can repeat the game infinitely, with the serial killer randomly assigned among the villagers. This demo revealed more about how these operations work, though there’s still a lot that Perfect Garbage hasn’t revealed, and it’s still unclear what the whole series of murders, romances, farming, and development of Ashenridge Village will look like.
Through the new demo, you’re introduced to the standard gameplay flow, which spans four seasons, each lasting 30 days of in-game time, and tracked on a calendar much like the Persona series of games. During the month, there are some big, unskippable events that take place around the entire village, along with other optional events — and while you might miss out on a chat with a nice guy, it’s also the perfect time to commit a crime.
You start the game with your character escaping from prison, and while lying on the ground, you use your trusty crowbar to break into a vacant farmhouse to stay at. Then, you can use this tool for other illegal actions – that is, breaking into the homes of city residents to conduct less-than-legal investigations. With so many killers, you can’t take any chances.
At the PAX East gaming event this spring, Perfect Garbage was pleasantly surprised to see that players didn’t shy away from suspicious activity, but rather immediately wanted to break and enter, suggesting they were willing to “be a little hot, a little unethical sometimes” for a good cause, Nahill said. This affinity for crime should set his game apart from others with healthier, law-abiding tones. Grave Seasons aims to scratch a different itch.
“Everyone likes to learn things they’re not supposed to learn,” Nahill said. “I think that feeling of eavesdropping on gossip and digging up secrets is what a lot of people are drawn to in a narrative.” “We’re definitely drawn to drama, even outside of murders.”
Break your way into the village’s secrets
In my demo, I met the nice, burly guy Hari right after I “adopted” my farm, and then wandered into the village to break into his house, as Nahil suggested. And lo and behold, in his bathroom was a creepy-looking bathtub distillery powered by a mysterious crystal, which I had stolen – I needed it to power the encrypted machine in the basement of my approved farm. This mechanism allows me to assemble strange ingredients into mysterious recipes that will ward off the killer and protect one potential victim at a time.
These “mysterious preventatives,” as Nahill calls them, are some of the big mechanics of the game. It’s not a game of finding out who the killer is – it’s a game of seeing how the city evolves, especially if you so choose no To save the city’s residents.
“Once you see a kill or two, you might be able to easily tell what kind of creature it is, and so we really want to focus on that prevention or lack thereof and how that changes the city itself,” Naeher said.
In the demo scenario I played, the player character comes into the mayor’s office – which becomes a horrific scene.
What’s the key phrase there is “creature type”, as the killers will be one of many types of supernatural beings. In last year’s demo, I saw a huge wolf-man-like monster in the shadows with red eyes tearing apart a villager. Naher implied that some of these arcane preventive methods would follow traditional mythological associations — for example, gathering silver, which many myths suggest is effective against werewolves and vampires — but he did not go into detail.
The killer will never target the player, but can be interacted with. Although you don’t play a detective tracking down a killer in Grave Seasons, you do have “choices and outcomes,” as Nahil hinted: “Confronting a killer in these moments is about how effectively you prepare, not how effectively you choose a particular dialogue tree. You can’t really use charisma to convince a killer to stop.”
“They’re on their own mission, they have their own story, they have their own reasons for killing, so you can’t necessarily talk your way out of what’s going on,” Nahill said.
What you can speak to are the hearts of other villagers.
Love in a time of killing
When death stalks the town of Grave Seasons, the romance changes depending on the identity of the killer — including whether you accidentally or intentionally romanced him, Nahill said.
“We like to show the branching and diversity inherent in our game based on who the killer is at that specific moment,” Nahill said. “We like to offer a lot of variety and a lot of interaction with player choice, even in our romantic paths.”
There’s a lot Nahil and Perfect Garbage haven’t said yet, including the number of possible romances between the villagers – and not all of them are open to romance. But it’s one of those that will fall for the player character’s charm no matter what gender is chosen when creating the character (from what I saw in this demo, there are a variety of body types, hair types, and more that can be mixed and matched without restrictions). This balances out what is known colloquially as a “genderqueer” approach that does not restrict romantic options to specific sexualities, while also depriving some villagers who are not available or interested.
“We curated this group (of romance options) to really focus on the complexity of the story and to account for (diversity) if you sympathize with the killer,” Nahill said.
And there’s lethal romance, which is rare in games – but not in other media, such as romance books, movies, and TV shows. The rise in enthusiasm for the Twisted Love flavor has buoyed the developers of Perfect Garbage.
“Dark romance is a huge draw in a variety of different games and media, so we’re excited to embrace those gamers and people who want to explore something a little more exciting, a little more controversial in their romance novels,” Nahill said.
