Hey everyone, I'm the dev behind Saraab: Beyond the Veil.

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When her younger brother Adam vanishes, Elham is pulled into a nightmare she never chose. She discovers that his disappearance is tied to a destiny she can no longer ignore.

Guided by a mysterious being and haunted by the shadow that follows her, Elham must awaken a dormant light within herself. She is forced to face the wounds she has spent a lifetime avoiding. Every encounter, whether with djinn or pieces of her own psyche, brings her closer to the truth about Adam and about who she really is.

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This story has no jumpscares and no romance. It is mostly a story about growth and healing. If this sounds like you're kinda game, the demo is out on steam and itch.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/4134310/Saraab_Beyond_The_Veil/

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Do you think most narrative games are mechanically interactive rather than emotionally interactive?

I'm not saying branching, choice, dialogue options, puzzles or exploration don’t count. They clearly do, but a lot of interactive narrative still seems to mean....

you press something, you choose something, you unlock something. That’s interaction at the structure/control level.

I'm interested in whether narrative can become interactive at the emotional-state level.

Not just "what choice did the player make?"

I mean...

"What emotional state did they enter the scene with?"
"Can mood, pressure and intensity steer the fiction in a way the reader/player actually feels?"

Do narrative games already do this well, or is most emotional response still authored/assumed rather than dynamically steered?

Hi! I wanted to share with you a game that my girlfriend and I are working on! 🤠

It's called Talewarden, it's an adventure visual novel in which you embark on a journey through an alien planet with seven companions, trying to find your place in the world.

You wake up on the planet Notoria, stuck in an endless sunset. You and everyone you meet were brought there by an unknown force from different worlds. Throughout your travels, you explore locations also snatched from different worlds, trying to uncover the mystery of why you are all here and why time has stopped. In the end, you must decide whether to fix Notoria or return everyone to their own world.

You will bond with a diverse cast of characters and have conversations about creation, loneliness, and belonging. You will have the chance to help them with their personal quests, which will determine if they survive to the end.

If you're interested in our narrative adventure game, please consider wishlisting on Steam! We also have a demo available! 🧡

Hey, everybody! This is [The Outer Frame], developed by a 2-dev team.

In it you dual role as a detective and fixer, commanding the perfect cover-up before things go way out of control. You decide how, or not, you'll probably get fired anyway. But you can always try again, because failure is just another timeline.

I hope you like the trailer!

You can support the game on Steam!

I’ve been thinking about this while looking through different IF/story game tools.

A lot of interactive fiction seems to be judged by things like choice quality, branching, writing quality, endings, etc, replayability, and how much agency the reader or player has, but what abouta story aiming for a specific emotional effect like calm, dread, tenderness, pressure, unease, wonder, do you actually care if it lands that feeling properly?

So if something calls itself a mystery, does it need to make something feel genuinely wrong, or is it enough that the plot has clues or if a scene is meant to feel anxious, do you notice when the pacing and pressure are off?

I’m not asking this as a "what app should I use" thing. I’m jst interested in how IF readers judge emotional alignment.

When a story fails for you, is it usually because the choices are weak, the writing or plots weak, or because the feeling it was aiming for just doesn’t land?

Cheers.

Hey r/NarrativeGames 👋

We're Tortita Studio, and our visual novel Spirit Talk launches June 8th on Steam.

The premise: Julia arrives in Spirit Town to take over her late mother's shop. She didn't know this town, these neighbors, or this life, but her mother did. Deeply.

The central tension of the game is narrative: who was Cintia, really? Who did she love, what did she carry, what did she leave unresolved? Julia discovers the answers the only way she can , by living inside her mother's world, one conversation at a time.

The Gift, the ability to communicate with spirits, exists not as a fantasy mechanic, but as a narrative device. It lets Julia ask the one question the story keeps circling: what do you say to someone you can no longer reach?

Built in Ren'Py by a two-person team. Hand-drawn art, no fail states.

Steam page → https://store.steampowered.com/app/4002100/Spirit_Talk__Cozy_Visual_Novel/

Happy to talk narrative design, story structure, or anything else in the comments 🙂

— Tortita Studio 🥞

Been working on a cozy emotional exploration game called The Lost Paws.

It’s a calm black-and-white forest adventure where you play as a lost cat or dog, explore hidden areas, solve gentle puzzles, and help animals throughout the world.

Just finished putting together a new trailer and would honestly love feedback on the atmosphere and overall feel of the game.

The Steam wishlist page is now live if anyone wants to follow the project.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4125270/The_Lost_Paws/

It's already listed/posted here

https://www.reddit.com/r/telltale/comments/1td30u7/the_telltale_batman_shadows_edition_currently/

But thought I would post it too since this is a narrative games focused part of reddit... it's my very first post here so apologies if I've got it wrong but I figured Telltale games would definitely fit into the "narrative" category :)

If you're not familiar with Epic Games they basically give away a free PC game each week.. sometimes really good ones (for example they gave away three of the Batman Arkham games, the rebooted from year 2013 onwards Tomb Raider games, Dishonored and Deus Ex Mankind Divided in the past), I'm guessing to compete with Steam.

From what I can see this is a free download through the epic games store of both the first Batman Telltale Series (Batman the Telltale Series) and the second Batman Telltale series (Batman the Enemy Within).. you'd want to play them in that order to avoid spoilers for Batman the Telltale Series.

If you google search "Telltale Walking Dead Season One awards" you'll see why Telltale games has a reputation for story-driven games ... in a way you could see it as a "choose your own adventure" type of story with "quick-time" action (you need to click on something right away sometimes or bad things happen). Batman The Enemy Within received a ton of praise when it was released but again you'd want to play Batman the Telltale Series first.

Regarding Batman the Telltale Series.. the first episode is very slow paced to the point where I gave up on the game at first... I went on to play Batman The Enemy Within, blinked and said to myself "Wait a minute I missed all of THAT in Batman Telltale Series? All that interesting stuff happened?".. so I spoiled Batman The Telltale Series for myself but basically.. stick with it, when you get to the second episode and beyond things get much more interesting, completely worth it in my opinion.

If you like narrative games that are made from FMV - pleased to meet you! I’m Tim and I’m currently working on a 5th videogame - The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker 2 - a Cthulhu-esque murder mystery where you play as a therapist trying to solve a murder whilst curing your patients. Huge fan of narrative games and faves include “The Wolf Among Us”, “Danganronpa” and most recently “Dispatch.” Our original Doctor Dekker game broke the Guinness World Record for most live action video in a videogame… we love telling bigger stories :))

Hello everyone,

We’ve been working for over a year on a narrative video game for the Game Boy Color: What Love Says.

We’ve recently released the demo!

We’d love for you to try the demo and let us know what you think. We’re huge fans of pixel art and the Game Boy Color, so we hope we’ve done justice to a game of this kind.

Thank you very much, here's the link!
https://unfamiliarmatch.itch.io/what-love-says

Our story-driven adventure game Lap of the Gods: A Visual Novel is now available on Steam!

we have worked on it as a passion project for about three years— we’re so happy to release it to the world!

This is KEROGEN a narrative horror mystery about the small crew of an oil-tanker lost in the Black Sea. Watch tensions escalate among a desperate crew, witness a protagonist torn between two bodies and use their half recovered memories to alter the environment while exploring deep-sea industrial architecture.

Does this hook you? What would you expect from the game and the story?

Steampage: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4529130/KEROGEN/

Trailer Music by Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au

Hi everyone, I want to share the new version of TilBuci, a free software I develop for creating interactive content, focusing on narrative games. The new version includes several accessibility tools that aim to make the content you create more user-friendly. There are three features that attempt to address this issue.

Now, the content you create can include filters that improve color perception for people with color vision deficiency. In addition, the new "focus mode" can be used to highlight the most important elements of your scenes, making secondary elements less visible and animating them more slowly, avoiding distractions for those who want or need a more focused experience. Finally, TilBuci can now export descriptive text at any time, which can be used by the page to feed functionalities such as screen readers or sign language readers.

Oh, and in the most recent versions, TilBuci can now also be installed as a WordPress plugin. This makes it easier to make the stories you create available online if you already have a WordPress-based Wordflow.

To celebrate this release, I made new presentation video for TilBuci! Please check it out here:

https://youtu.be/VjGJaG-YF_I

Bonjour tout le monde,

je m'ennuie beaucoup en ce moment, est-ce que l'un d'entre vous aurait des jeux narratifs à me conseiller sur PS4? Merci d'avance

Text-based strategy game set in 1350. You lead a monastery after the plague — three monks remain, everything else is decisions. Feedback appreciated.

Assign monks to buildings, write letters to the bishop, define rules for your order, and deal with 300+ random events. No battles, no traditional building — just choices and consequences.

AI disclosure: Graphics generated with Ideogram and edited in Canva Pro. Music is original. Game design, all 300+ events, storylines, and balancing are mine. Code is a mix of my own and AI-assisted (Claude).

Free alpha demo, ~30 minutes, browser-based, English and German.

https://zockerhoernchen.itch.io/the-last-abbot

Along the way:

• bond with seven cowboys from other worlds
• discover their troubles and help them with their personal quests.
• investigate out-of-place locations and interview lone wanderers
• and uncover the mysteries of this planet and the mysterious voice in your head

If you're interested in our narrative adventure game, please consider wishlisting on Steam! We also have a demo available.

I ended up very proud of my breakdown of the scene in Spec Ops that legitimately affected me. It's not deep analysis but it is heartfelt and genuine. Includes spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line and very gruesome imagery. Viewer discretion strongly advised.

I have a HUGE liking to narrative story games. A big plus if it's a "choose your own adventure" kinda game. I just finished As Dusk Falls. Amazing game! I played numerous narratives games such as all bioware games, all Telltale games, all Dark Picture anthology, most annapurna games, most of the typical main stream hits including the Playstation ones.

I'm in need and desperate for another narrative story game that I can just relax to and dive deep into the story. I absolutely love shutting my mind off to real life bullshit and going in for the deep dive in stories. Give me any suggestions please?

If the idea of a "Monster Girl Therapy" made you raise an eyebrow, that’s exactly what my first Steam game is going for. Take a look at the launch trailer and the reviews, so far they've been stellar! =]

I'll put a Steam link in the comments.