Soul Cemetery

Your mom calls late at night—something happened, you need to come home. So you pack an overnight bag and race towards your hometown bathed by stars and moonlight, trying not to let late-night throughts creep over the edges of your headlights and into your path.

At home (you still call it home) mom's fallen asleep. You settle in to your childhood bedroom and find everything where you left it: an old jacket on the bed, glowing stars burnt out on the wall, and your old game console still hooked up with the controller wrapped poorly beside it.

A pang of child-fear shivers across your neck—the box art for that old survival horror game takes you back. An inexplicable urge draws you to start the game again, to see where you left off, to remember what it did to you, to explore the laser-coded depths. Conquer something once dangers, perhaps. Exert your control over the feelings wrapped around your innards.

Perhaps it will be different. Perhaps it will be easier. Or perhaps there's a reason your brain locked it away in the vault for all those years...

Soul Cemetery is a solo horror TTRPG about how media changes us, how media changes with us, and how we change media by interacting with it, told through the lens of replaying a survival horror classic from your childhood.

Soul Cemetery presents you with levels of the fictional video game, each comprised of several scenes that give you prompts or ask you to react. Each scene will be revisited several times, with the answers and reactions to them changing over time as the game (and your past) becomes more clear.

Soul Cemetery is a fictional piece of media, a fake video game. A gamecube-era survival horror game from a fictional company, complete with screenshots, concept art, control scheme, and in-game item descriptions, all laid out like a classic game manual that you'd find in the copy of your favorite video game.

The story of the game itself mirrors the story of the solo game: Detective Hashford, a rookie detective returns to her hometown to solve a strange incident involving her father, only to find out that an evil moon spirit has begun raising the dead. She fights zombies, traverses through survival horror areas, and comes face to face with the past she thought she left behind.

Complete with tank controls, sharp, polygonal models ala ps1-horror, and an original soundtrack, Soul Cemetery is a cult classic that no one remembers, or...no one remembers it the same~

Excuse the poor mockup, but this is my ideal way to release Soul Cemetery and something I hope to be able to do in the future. I want to release it as a physical case with its own custom cover, the booklest and the OST inside, just like the videogame would have been packaged. Part of the reason for the itchfunding is to see if people gel with this enough to release it like this.

I used to obsessed over these booklets as a kid, reading them on the car rides back from Blockbuster or Walmart, hiding in my room to look for any secrets or to learn the little behind-the-scene tidbits that you'd never find by just playing the game. I wanted to emulate that experience with this while also turning it into a solo TTRPG~

Buying the game here gives you the OST, but it's also up on bandcamp <3

https://snow117.bandcamp.com/album/soul-cemetery-ost

I'm doing itchfunding because this is the last big release I'll have this year. Supporting my games means I get to pay rent, feed my cat, afford groceries, get my HRT meds, and inch closer to other gender affirming care. This is my full time job and so every dollar is put to use in maintaining that.

I don't have a marketing budget so I advertise through my youtube, mailing list, and twitter. Sharing by word of mouth (or even just retweeting) is the best way to help me get this project in front of the freaks like me who would love it.

Thank you all for the support~