Swords, sorcery, and seduction! Redeem your family, fight for glory, save the world, and smash the competition in a tournament for the ages! To the Hilt: Passion Unsheathed is a 300,000-word interactive novel by Raven de Hart. We sat down with Raven to discuss the game.

It releases this Thursday, October 22nd. You can play the first three chapters today for free and also wishlist it on Steam—even if you don’t plan to purchase it there, it really helps!

This is your third title for Heart’s Choice! We’re thrilled that you keep coming back for more. How has your writing evolved over the course of these three games?

Hard to say for sure. Evolution in writing is slow, like evolution in real life, often so slow and subtle that it’s invisible. So I’ll try my best. A lot has changed since I wrote These Thieving Hearts, both in my life and in my writing. I’m most of the way through a forensic psychology degree, lost three dogs, saw my mother through a nephrectomy for cancer, and got diagnosed with gout like some 18th century nobleman. But specifically for writing, I would say that it’s my–and this is going to sound ungodly pretentious, so forgive me–recent meditations on the nature and purpose of spectacle. There’s power in spectacle, even just for spectacle’s sake, but there’s especially power in spectacle when it serves something else. It’s touched on all of my writing, but I don’t think it’s going to take a magnifying glass and a fine-toothed comb to notice the spectacle in To the Hilt. I mean…it’s a magical tournament in an ancient palace carved into a mountaintop, held because the world powers could raze cities if they came to blows. Spectacle runs through the DNA of this game. And as someone who used to write considerably more restrained work, I’d say that’s a decently large change.

To the Hilt is your highest-fantasy title for us yet: it’s a fully secondary world, with giant eagles and other fantasy creatures; as well as lots of magic that the PC can learn and use. Best of all, it has dragons! Tell us about your dragons and their culture.

Yeah. I’m a hardcore fantasy nerd, and who doesn’t like a dragon?

For me, and for the world of Hexian, I knew that I was going to have these very fixed factions, places with very defined seats of power, locations, vibes, all that. I wanted all the human factions to do like humans tend to and settle in place and build.

But dragons? Why would dragons, so traditionally associated with greed and growth and ownership and treasure, be satisfied with one place, one city? So the dragons don’t have much of a culture inherent to them; they’re not isolated, but they’re relatively independent and solitary. However, Disheth started collecting dragons for his Great Hoard, making a faction with no physical seat of power, and hence no limits. They exist as a faction on par with anyone else, but they come and go, live everywhere, and have, at best, a loose affiliation with each other. It’s more an understanding that a member of the Great Hoard has the protection of the others if they ask, and that crossing them is crossing Disheth. And most people don’t want to cross Disheth.

On the specific magic and physiology, because of course in an explicit romance, physiology becomes important, I knew that they would need the capacity to take vaguely human forms. It’s the kind of thing that’s useful for dealing with the primarily human world powers, and it’s also further expansion of the concept of greed and hoarding. Why would they be satisfied with only the one body they were born with? The flame colors, I also wanted to be different. Not to belittle anyone else who writes dragons this way, because I love them, but I didn’t want the dragons in To the Hilt to have “green fire is poison, blue fire is cold” and all that. But I figured they would have developed flame for hunting, so what modifications would be useful to a predator? Weighing the prey down, making them sleepy, making them afraid. Those are the kinds of tack-on effects these dragons have on their flames.

You’ve talked a lot about the role that anime played as an inspiration for this game. What are some of your favorite animes? Where would you suggest someone should start if they’re looking to understand where To the Hilt came from?

Oh, I will try to restrain myself. I was 100% one of those “Anime Kids” in high school…and now I’m 35 and still definitely an…well, I have gout, so not an Anime Kid. But I’m down with it nonetheless. And I think anyone who has seen the classic action shonen will recognize the structure of a tournament arc. Obviously, this one is a little different rather than being a strict bracket, but a good tournament arc can be one of the strongest, most memorable arcs in any anime/manga.

If I was going to pick an anime to recommend to kind of accompany To the Hilt, my instinct says Record of Ragnarok. Like To the Hilt, it’s just a tournament from start to finish, and it’s not so long as to be overwhelming. And, completely on accident, the Thirteen-Year Tournament in To the Hilt does have an interesting mirror to the 13 v 13 format in Record of Ragnarok.

As for my favorites? I don’t think you can go wrong with Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Ever. But my all time favorite, maybe my all time favorite show period, is Code Geass. Giant robots (spectacle), sociopolitics, secrets, magic…honestly, as I describe it, it probably influenced To the Hilt in some way, because the game has all of those too, other than the robots.

What are you working on next?

Mostly finishing school. I got started in college late–started at 32–but my Bachelor’s in Forensic Psychology is in its last year, and then I’ll be moving into grad school for mental health counseling, if everything works out properly.

On writing, I’m about 17,000 words into a new fantasy series. It’s one that I’ve been picking at for a year, and finally found the right angle from which to approach it. It’s set in a world completely covered in fungus, with even the people infested from birth, and touches on the nature of long-term trauma and environmentalism…and magical spectacle, of course. I told you, it’s everywhere in my writing now. I don’t have any date for it whatsoever, but if you ever see The Bloom Cycle floating out in the wild, that’s me.