Infiltrate the undying emperor’s palace, gain his trust, and assassinate him! Your choices could save the empire, conquer it, or destroy it forever. A Blade for the Emperor is a 600,000-word interactive novel by Samuel Gohra. It releases on Thursday, October 15th, and you can wishlist it on Steam today! We sat down with Samuel to discuss the game.

A Blade for the Emperor is about an assassin, so it goes to some pretty dark places. How do you pull yourself back from that after a long writing session?

There is definitely plenty of darkness in this story. The player is an assassin (though they choose just how much blood they spill), venturing into a setting beset by dark magic, monsters, and people doing monstrous things.

I actually find quite a lot of contrast from the more morbid elements within the writing process itself. It isn’t a story of unremitting bleakness, and I always strive to find room for color and life and humor amid all the grisly skulduggery.

Beyond writing, I find it a great reprieve to hike around some of the more scenic idylls I’m lucky enough to have close by, which are largely assassin-free. There are also some alternative Australian comedy creators that can reliably scour anything remotely serious or sensible from my brain.

I’m always taking in other stories, whether playing or watching or reading something – it’s an important source of nourishment, and escapism from my own creative endeavors. I like to have a balanced diet of heavier and lighter things, from different media and genres, so I’m always coming back to my own projects with a fresh melange of inspirations.

Despite the darkness, I imagine it has to be fun to write a PC who’s a badass assassin. Is there a particular physical or magical feat that the PC can do that you’re particularly proud of inventing?

It has been great fun putting the player at the center of a city coming apart at the seams, taking them through a gauntlet that reaches from the lowest depths underground to the most distant heights above the clouds – and finding all the ways that their skills supernatural and otherwise could be put to use.

The source of much of the PC’s power is Quintessence, a finite inner essence that allows them to push beyond normal human limits. This opened up possibilities I thoroughly enjoyed writing, such as mimicking any voice regardless of the player’s own identity – from commanders to emperors to demons, and other special possibilities I won’t spoil.

Their supernatural resilience also opened up some interesting opportunities, including a particular scenario I’m quite fond of. With poisoned drinks before them and their target sat alongside them, the PC can choose to drink deeply to ensure their target does also – plunging them both into a hallucinatory delirium when the poison takes hold, and taking the PC down an otherworldly path. I always enjoy being able to hide strange, secret things down what might be less-trodden paths.

You’ve also had a professional life in games journalism. What perspective does that give you on the industry? How does it inform your fiction and game writing?

Above all, I think writing about the industry and within it has increased my appreciation for the immense amount of effort that goes into every project. By their nature, games are such complex and distinct creations, often representing the collaboration of many different disciplines. So much work goes into incredible concepts that for a multitude of reasons may never reach the audiences that would have loved them, and it’s a kind of miracle whenever one gets across the line.

It makes me immensely grateful to have had the support, collaboration and guidance of Choice of Games, to bring this story to completion.

It has shaped my approach to fiction significantly as well. Having written about games from an analytical perspective, trying to articulate what I love most about my favorite gaming experiences and how they work, I’m often consciously drawing on these same techniques that I’ve connected with in other stories.

Turning to another one of your other projects, I’m fascinated by your VR game Walk the Past! Do you have a background in history? How did you go about the research for that game?

This was an indie game project, essentially a walking simulator experience that explored the Battle of Cartagena, taking players through the locations and events of a really remarkable conflict in Spanish and British history.

Through the developer Balandra Studios, I was fortunate enough to have access to deeply informed academic insight. There is also a trove of primary sources to be found online, including journals of key figures – the Balandra team provided translation for Spanish sources, and it was an engrossing challenge to construct the unfolding battle, and dramatize this through conflicting narrators and collectible journal fragments. There was a real sense of escalation, turning points, ticking clocks and mounting hubris, that emerged quite organically from the factual accounts, often fitting together into a narrative of their own accord.

My interest in history is more recreational than formal study, but I have relished opportunities to delve into specific periods for particular projects.

Writing the imperial machinations of A Blade for the Emperor was another opportunity to do so. The strangest smallest details from history have inspired entire characters and storylines in this story, from the unlikely origin of certain priceless ancient dyes, to the likely apocryphal demises of historical queens.

What are you working on next?

There are a few prose and screen concepts that have been sitting on for some time, as I worked on A Blade for the Emperor. In the short term, I think it will be a nice change of pace to write something that isn’t half a million words long – thankfully that’s virtually everything else. There are a few short stories bouncing around in my head, some short film concepts I’ve been discussing with a collaborator for a while, and a longer prose concept that I think could well end up as another interactive project.

I’m looking forward to spending some time mulling these over and exploring opportunities, and finding out which is next!