itch.io

At the moment this short alpha includes two scenes and uses three of the five prepared backgrounds, a sprite of one character - and a number of details as the story progresses, which, when read, make the image quite dynamic (to the point that we tried to make each text screen contain a new element).

Other reworked sprites, backgrounds and reasoning were posted on our blog, but the alpha was posted a little earlier due to the difficult situation with the developer (we live in eastern Ukraine and, taking into account a number of difficulties, we decided that it was better to post the raw version than not to post it later at all). 

The "Book of Tizian" comes immediately after the end of the "Story of the North", as was originally intended for the root. A brief description of the plot of the last book is contained in the prologue, and its beginning is comparable, like all other routes, with the meeting of the Archon and Tizian in the ruins of old Saugunt. The discrepancy is that if in the first book the scene ends with Titian recognizing his soul mate in the hidden mask of the Archon, and this does not happen in his personal route and he suffocates them. There are three scenes in the new book - a prologue, a scene where the Archon loses consciousness, and their vision of their current and future, bestowed by Cybelle. Everything about this place is pretty arthouse o///o 

I would like to think that the point is not in translation, but in the style of narration in general - speaking shortly, this is a stream of consciousness and a weighty centering goes to the unreliability of the narrator (the main character is a possessed undead, their psyche and formulations are different from human ones and all their perception and interpretation is built on a very overflowing and flowery speech, rich in primordial and achthonic colors). 

The Archon is a complex character, even by the standards of Secunda as a whole, they are meant to be a delicious twist on playing a dark fantasy, arch-historical villain. They cannot be described in one single, concretized way that could be applied to every scene and every route, their nature is fluid and full of different tones. The prism of their reality is the main weight both in the narrative and in history as a whole, and to simplify the construction of their characterization, reducing it to archetypal and easily described concepts, would be harmful to the book, in general and in particular. The Archon is conceived as a character who will constantly ask questions about their identity, gender and natural, about their personal and surrounding motives, about the structure of their thinking and inner world, and, in addition, about the reality and order of situations that they find themselves in, too o----o