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The empress of Hell is gone. Seize her throne, and wage war on Heaven! To Reign in Hell is a 600,000-word interactive novel by Stuart Martyn. It releases on Thursday, October 29th, and you can play the demo for free today! We sat down with Stuart to discuss the game.

You’ve got a fantastically detailed vision of the underworld, with a complex society and geography that borrows from a wide range of mythology and literature in addition to having many elements that are uniquely your own. What were some particular inspirations in creating your vision of Hell? What system(s) of ethics did you build on?

I took inspiration from various places. There’s a lot of Judeo-Christian hell in there, a decent amount of Greco-Roman (especially the rivers), some smaller nods to Egyptian and Aztec netherworlds as well as a few fictional inspirations.

In terms of ethics, it was important to me that the denizens of hell aren’t, as people might assume, ontologically evil. The first wave of fallen angels in To Reign In Hell fought for a compassionate and utopian vision that was never realized. A few NPCs present their own answers and theories as to why, but I don’t like to give a single authorial answer for these sorts of questions, especially for a game where the player’s opinion is the most important. Still, I wanted to make it clear that evil isn’t a cosmic force like gravity; it’s a consequence of the choices we make, the behaviors we reward or accept.

Players explore this through three factions that they can side with. Their leaders will, if you talk to them, explain their positions and they’ve got some good points to make! Their words and actions don’t always line up comfortably, however. Of course, you can also decide to sidestep the politics and focus entirely on breaking free of hell or seizing power entirely for yourself, though that might be a little more difficult.

Conversely, Heaven is the antagonist. How did you go about turning angels into the PC’s enemies?

The game almost immediately places heaven in an antagonistic position when they attack you seemingly unprovoked, but one of the challenges for me was keeping (most of) heaven’s representatives in a more ambiguous state so there’s no clear answer in the choice to escalate or de-escalate the conflict. Heaven’s hands are far from clean, but hell isn’t a nice place which gives them some moral high ground.

Keeping heaven in that middle ground was important to me; I don’t want a peaceful or warlike route to be unambiguously cruel or kind, right or wrong. I want a PC’s subjective morality to be the key. For example, a cynical, power-hungry PC might seek peace with heaven for unaltruistic reasons. A more moral character may view heaven as jailers and believe that they deserve to be punished.

What is your favorite weird power or physical description that you gave to a demon?

In this setting, demons change over time in line with their desires, decisions, scars and sins. As the story develops, the PC and their equipment go through some small changes in line with their choices, skills and personality. Some of these changes are more inward and subtle while others are obvious. I had a lot of fun with one possible mutation that lets the PC’s skin change color to blend in with their surroundings. I also quite enjoyed writing the body horror that slowly seeps into the game if a player commits to certain decisions…

I appreciated getting weird with some NPCs who have warped into particularly unusual forms or are inhuman in more subtle ways. My favorite weird physical description is actually a spoiler, so I’ll settle for the character who is happily married to the parasite/symbiote that replaced his tongue.

Across your whole body of writing, you go to some pretty dark places. What is it about demons and darkness that keep drawing you back to them?

I think darker settings let you tackle difficult questions and morality without ambushing players who don’t want that. If you’re going to hell, you’re primed for tough choices and questions!

I wanted to create a setting where PCs could be selfish and cruel and revel in it. Evil routes in games often lack texture of variety, so here I wanted options to play a sneak, a brute, a schemer or combinations thereof. At the same time, I also think that in darker places acts of heroism shine all the brighter. That doesn’t mean that choosing good should be easy, so in To Reign In Hell acting selflessly often provides fewer clear benefits and less progress towards certain goals. It’s entirely possible to get a good ending by playing a more straightforwardly heroic character, but it’s a more challenging run. Hopefully that will make it more rewarding as well.

I’m fascinated by your experience with megagames! Tell us a little more about that. How does that work? How do you manage a very large player base? What are some of the challenges and rewards in a play-by-email game?

During lockdown, in-person games weren’t possible so I ran a lot of play-by-email games with large casts of players and even NPCs. In most of the games I’ve run, players had a weekly turn and altered the gamestate/advanced plotlines by sending in a limited number of actions to the gamemasters. I would resolve their actions by testing a trait and writing some second-person fiction. Great practice for a Choicescript game!

Generally, these games are collaborative experiences with a team of gamerunners and players, which can – with the right team – lead to some truly incredible ‘Yes, and’ worldbuilding, creating a living and breathing world that is constantly changing as it responds to your actions. One of the best parts of any megagame was the postgame debrief where players could share their experiences and discover all the plot threads, cultures and storylines they never knew about.

When running games for a very large number of players, it is important to make sure they always feel empowered, as it’s more difficult for any single player to be ‘the protagonist’ in the way they would be in a video game or even a shared tabletop experience. You also need to keep track of all the narratives and keep a complex gamestate in mind. This really helped when it came to keeping the various possible routes a player might take through To Reign In Hell in mind while writing.

Steam’s annual Halloween sale is here, and three horror-themed Hosted Games are on sale for up to 33% off!

• Unnatural Season Two
• Throne of Blood
• The Passenger

Get them on Steam before the sale ends on November 2nd!

We’re proud to announce that To the Hilt: Passion Unsheathed, the latest in our “Heart’s Choice” line of multiple-choice interactive romance novels, is now available for iOS and Android in the “Heart’s Choice” app. You can also download it on Steam or enjoy it on our website. It’s 30% off until October 29th!

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 high-heat interactive fantasy romance novel by Raven de Hart. It’s entirely text-based, 315,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

In the world of Hexian, where the strongest fighters can fell mountains or cleave through the sky, a war might destroy the entire planet. Instead, there is the Thirteen-Year Tournament, a gathering to show off the finest young warriors from each realm, and to show rival nations what might threaten them if they cross a line. It’s an opportunity for trade, negotiations, jockeying for power among visiting dignitaries. The combatants themselves are made magically invulnerable, opening the path to impossibly dramatic feats of arms and magic – and impossibly dramatic amounts of glory.

You’re one of those fighters, the best that your generation has to offer – but as the son of a disgraced noble, this tournament gives you an opportunity to climb higher than most. If you triumph, you can repair your legacy, make a name for yourself, and replenish your family coffers with the treasures that flow as freely as wine.

But the most valuable treasure may be love. With so many young fighters under so much pressure, it’s only natural that passion will spill over in the arena.

Your former lover Prince Kidran is here: tall and blond in his silver crown. You know his body almost as well as you know your own – or at least you did, before he was weighed down so much by his royal duties. Do you have the courage to try again? Can you help him forget his burdens with a night of ecstasy?

Or there’s Archduke Hainn, with his golden eyes, bright-flashing smile, and voice so deep that it vibrates through you. He’ll always leave you wanting more in the bedroom, and his jungle kingdom is full of secrets.

Not as many secrets as Chier, though. Brooding, mysterious, with lithe muscles and startling blue eyes, he soars through the air on giant eagles and summons immense magical power with his fingertips – and uses those same fingertips for gentle sensuous touches. Why has he really crossed half the world to be here?

For fewer secrets, there’s brawny mercenary Tlekk, with black hair, bronzed skin, and powerful muscles. He knows what it’s like to want to climb higher. He bounds across the arena in a blur of acrobatic athleticism – and he brings the same energy to the bedroom.

Or, there’s Errgaul, a green dragon whose human form is utterly perfect, with black hair and a brilliant white smile. The Queen tells you that an alliance with the dragons could mean prosperity for the realm and redemption for your family. But maybe you and Errgaul just want to steam up the bathhouse with a stolen moment of passion between tournament rounds.

You can find true love, a political match, or just the hottest night between the sheets that you’ve ever had. But beware, because the intrigue at this tournament has even sharper edges than the swords, and the most dangerous enemies might not be in the ring…

• Play as a man romancing men
• Romance a serious prince, a cheerful archduke, an energetic mercenary, a brooding sorcerer-warrior, or a devastatingly handsome dragon
• Choose your magical specialty—aggressive Force, protective Barriers, or environment-shaping Aura—and use it to bring down your opponents in the ring!
• Uncover buried secrets that threaten to bring down an empire
• Make peace among the realms, or use your public role to stir up discord and spur the nations to war

What’s a little swordplay between lovers?

We hope you enjoy playing To the Hilt: Passion Unsheathed. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

Libraries are not just books, and they haven’t been for some time now.

Libraries have evolved, adapted, and reconfigured their collections and services to meet the needs of their users better, whether that’s students and educators in an academic library or families and older adults in a public library.

Digital Games in Libraries is a project focused on ensuring that digital-only video games remain accessible for future generations. As games increasingly shift away from physical media, libraries and archives face significant challenges in securing access. This is especially important for educators, scholars, and students studying games and game development, as access to historic and contemporary games is essential.

Not that long ago, it seemed ridiculous for libraries to offer ebooks or streaming services. Today, it’s commonplace. Our goal is for librarians, game developers, and library users to similarly take for granted that digital games belong in libraries.

DGIL in Libraries is hosting a free Digital Forum on October 29-30 to discuss the exciting yet daunting task of initiating this journey. DGIL is bringing together librarians, game developers, game lovers, and law and policy advocates to inspire the conversations and collaborations digital games deserve.

We’re pleased to say that Choice of Games’ very own Rebecca Slitt will be presenting “Collect Us, Please!” A Publisher’s Perspective on Digital Games in Libraries.

Other presenters include game-making legends Andrew Plotkin, Grim Baccaris, and Devinne Moses. They will cover everything from the importance of communities like COG in this endeavor to how developers can work with libraries and librarians, and how this relationship can be mutually beneficial.

You can see a full list of presenters here.

DGIL would like to thank Choice of Games for letting us promote our event on their blog. These communities are exactly the voices we want to hear from to help propel DGIL into action.

Can’t make it on October 29 or 30? No problem! The presentations will be recorded.

Want to stay updated with DGIL news? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Find out more at: https://soe.uncg.edu/rdi/dgil/

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.

We’re proud to announce that A Blade for the Emperor, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

It’s 40% off until October 22nd!

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 an interactive dark fantasy novel by Samuel Gohra, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—600,000 words and hundreds of choices—without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

From his seat of power, Emperor Erid Virdeus dominates his lands with oppressive decrees and twisted curses. There is no greater danger than a tyrant with magic at their fingertips–and you are the assassin tasked with ending this existential threat. Runes carved into your very bones give you supernatural abilities far above those of most humans.

But the capital is already in turmoil. Guards savage the populace, rebels plot in the shadows, sorcery silences rebellious voices, and creatures of rotting death lurk in the caves that carve through the earth below the city streets.

Choose your allies with care, for everyone here has secrets of their own. One of the emperor’s heirs has already been exiled for defying him—will you ally with her and fan the flames of revolt? Or you might stand with the emperor’s other kin: a refined politician, or a mighty warrior.

As you remove imperial servants one by one, you and your allies must shape the future that follows. Who will sit upon the throne? Will you leave the realm in peaceful prosperity or bloody broken ruin?

Bring death to those you deem deserving, forge alliances with courtiers or rebels, dare to follow your heart and find love amid treachery and murder, delve into magical secrets to unlock the power running through every leaf and root in the city.

Who will you leave in your wake, as a bloodied corpse, a mottled creature, or a spurned and broken tool? And who will you guide into the future, as a redeemed and reformed paragon, a closely protected consort, or an all-powerful ruler?

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi.
• Perfect your assassin’s craft: be a silent knife in the dark, a whispering puppeteer, a rune-bolstered warrior, a chameleon spy, or a silver-tongued rogue?
• Romance the emperor’s refined politically-savvy sister; a hot-headed warlike royal cousin; or his rebellious exiled sister, becoming the power behind a new throne–or slay them and set up a new leader.
• Shape the realm that rises from the ashes: become a merciful savior, a bloody butcher, or a being of elemental transcendence.
• Purge the city of perilous sorcery–or uncover the secret to the emperor’s immortality and wield it for yourself.

How many must die, to bring an end to the immortal empire?

We hope you enjoy playing A Blade for the Emperor. We encourage you to tell your friends about it and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

Pantheon of Bones, a new DLC for Life as a Lich by Adrao, is now available for purchase! Another game by Adrao, Hero or Villain: Genesis, has received a major free update and expansion. To celebrate, we are placing all games associated with the new updates on sale: Life as a Lich, Tokyo Wizard, Raiders of the Icepeak Mountains, Hero or Villain: Genesis, Hero or Villain: Battle Royale, and all associated DLCs are up to 40% off until October 15th!

Life as a Lich — Pantheon of Bones adds new areas to explore, both above and below your dungeon, along with hoards of exotic components to fuel your undead studies.

Delve into a new wing of the Ossis Bibliotheca to uncover secrets of gods and demigods, learn to craft the Key of Unsealing and the Medallions of Infernal Dissonance and Broken Prayers, or just make some presents for your loved ones.

This expansion creates an entirely new sequence of quests tied to the gods themselves. Will you be a pawn of their designs, or forge your own destiny?

There are a dozen new spells to learn, from summoning demonic panthers, to buffing your minions in battle, to transmuting materials. But if learning is not your thing, you can also just take undeath a little slower and hang out with your companions!

Adrao developed these games using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

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!

Now through October 8th, you can get Choice of Games titles for up to 40% off on Steam as part of the Steam Autumn Sale. Hosted Games and Heart’s Choice titles are also participating in the Autumn Sale, so enjoy generous discounts on all three in this once-a-season sale!

In partnership with World of Darkness and Paradox Interactive, Choice of Games is proud to announce the release of Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night by Josh Labelle, now available on Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 20% off until September 24th!

Josh’s previous game, A Crown of Sorcery and Steel, is on sale this week as well!

These monsters aren’t just in the movies! Will you hunt the vampires, werewolves and others stalking Hollywood, or will you become a monster instead?

Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night is an interactive novel by Josh Labelle set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, 1,000,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Hollywood is full of monsters. From the greedy studio heads to the desperate hopefuls out for their big break, nobody gets out without sin. Once, you were one of those hopefuls, barely scraping by trying to make your dreams come true—scrambling to land auditions or hustling to get your screenplay read.

Then a chance encounter with the supernatural showed you that Hollywood is ruled by another kind of monster. You’ve dedicated yourself to hunting down the beasts who stalk the back alleys of Los Angeles, and doing everything in your power to stop the ones who rule the boardrooms.

It’s been a blockbuster summer for the supernatural, full of inexplicable phenomena and monstrous incidents. There are fires in the hills, ghosts in the theaters, and a beast threatening pets in Beverly Hills that is definitely not a coyote. Could it have something to do with EVRLST, the hottest new self-help and wellness cult run by a washed up ‘80s superstar? Is it true what they say about him never being seen in the daylight and not having aged a day in the last three decades? And what about the woman they call the Baron of Hollywood? What kind of power does she have—and can it possibly compare to the studio execs?

Fortunately, you’re not alone. Others have seen the truth in the shadows, including a retired special-effects wizard, a mortician to the stars, a theater manager, and more. You’ll need all the allies you can get as you drive through the seedy supernatural underbelly of Tinseltown, where chaos reigns, and blood and money flow. There’s no telling who will get top billing, and who will end up slashed on the cutting room floor.

Or will you shirk your hunting duties to pursue your Hollywood dream? Make connections, land jobs on movies, or even make a deal with the devil to get cast in a major blockbuster. Maybe the best way to defeat the bloodsucking monsters is to join them. Or is that Hollywood’s biggest lie, the lie you tell yourself?

• Play as male, female, nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or poly.
• Choose your weapon to blast through supernatural threats, and upgrade it for even greater firepower; and visit your local garage to find your perfect getaway vehicle.
• Stop a hot new celebrity from literally sucking the life out of their fans—or succumb to their charms and plunge into a romance.
• Solve a decades-old murder and set an unquiet soul to rest—or drive out the ghost with arcane force!
• Uncover the secrets behind a cult that preys on young vulnerable actors, and stop the monster behind it!

Redeem lost souls in the city of angels—or lose your own soul trying.

We hope you enjoy playing Hunter: The Reckoning — Day for Night . We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store and on Steam. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.