Loss
Loss, is a visual novel made in Twine that tells the tale of a Viking who returns from a raid to find his homeland is at the beginning of a major cultural shift. After receiving a divine vision from an unknown god, the player undertakes the task of documenting Nordic culture to make sense of the vision and try to retain some of their culture before it becomes overtaken by time. The player communicates with NPCs that range from divine beings to villagers to try to discover the identity of the mysterious god who contacted them. Depending on the player’s choices there are 8 different endings. This game focuses on themes revolving around the loss of oral traditions and cultures throughout time. This visual novel was produced over 3 weeks with a group of 3 others.
Loss, is published for free on itch.io! Click the link below to check it out.
My Contributions
For this project, my primary contribution was through providing creative direction as well as producing all the visuals for the project. I chose to utilize a sketch-like black-and-white aesthetic for the game drawing inspiration from games such as Return of the Obra Dinn which utilizes visuals to draw viewers deeper into the historical period. This direction for the visuals is intended to evoke the sense of writing in the journal that is core to the plot of the game as well as communicate the theme of things getting lost with time as the images are not perfectly rendered out and have a rough hand-drawn quality to them. I wanted to give a feeling that this is what one would see in the contents of the player’s journal if it was found hundreds of years later. While our game’s visuals are all still images with no animation, through the clever use of contrast, I was able to create evocative scenes despite the simple presentation of our game, for example, with a dream scene I utilized a stark shift toward a black background to make it feel like the player had closed their eyes to see the ghostly figure. I aimed to utilize the short time we had to produce the game to curate an evocative space that would take the player back into the time where the game is set.
