The Novelist asks one central question: can you achieve your dreams without pushing away the people you love? The game focuses on Dan Kaplan, a novelist struggling to write the most important book of his career while trying to be the best husband and father he can be. The Kaplans have come to a remote coastal home for the summer, unaware that they’re sharing the house with a mysterious ghostly presence: you.

Read the family’s thoughts. Explore their memories. Uncover their desires and intervene in their lives. But stay out of sight; you can’t help the Kaplans if they know there’s a ghost in the house. It’s up to you to decide how Dan’s career and family life will evolve, but choose carefully; there are no easy answers, and every choice has a cost.

Dan’s relationships – to his work, his wife, and his son – react and shift in response to your choices. With a different sequence of events in every playthrough, The Novelist gives life to a unique experience each time you play.

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SalsaShark said:

so you're Casper

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Venin said:

So, I appreciate what it's doing and I wouldn't want the developer to change their personal goals for this project, but I just can't help ultimately wanting more from it. Things such as playing the game as a more malevolent ghost who slowly rips apart the family, or just a prankster ghost who likes to play tricks and scare the family for a laugh.

It would be a nice feature to be able to pick your ghost's personality like that. It's just very rare to see a game like this.

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Stories are about people, which is why the game focuses on relationships. The way each player makes decisions and shapes those relationships will ultimately be what tells their story, as opposed to the more traditional method of players choosing between a handful of scripted branches that I wrote. I put a constraint on myself that all of the chapters in the game would come in a random order on each playthrough (more details below), and one of the main reasons for that is so that I couldn’t create a traditional branching story even if I wanted to; as the designer, I simply don’t know what chapter will come next. That self-imposed constraint forces me to view each chapter as a different way of approaching the same central question so that each player gets a unique experience that focuses on their values and choices, not a story I want to tell as a designer.

Each playthrough does feature the same chapters, but the uniqueness comes from the fact that the chapters come in a different order each time, as well as from the fact that the relationships are really the connective tissue that creates the narrative. It’s not so much about plot, which is spoilable, as it is about making difficult decisions in Dan’s struggle to balance his career with his family life, and from that your story emerges. Players don’t finish the game thinking “I did that, and then I did that, and then there was the big twist” so much as they think “I started off not caring much about Character X and focusing on Character Y, but Chapter 3 made me see Character Y in a new light, so I tried to improve that relationship but it was so hard not to side with Character Z in Chapter 5.”

The Novelist is a stealth game, so you need to explore the house without being seen. If there’s a character in an area you want to explore, you can possess a nearby light and make the bulb flicker, which distracts them into looking at it for a short while so you can explore the area. AI manipulation is a key aspect of stealth games, but I don’t want the family to feel like puppets who the player can toy with and make look foolish. That’s why I went with an everyday occurrence like a flickering light; if a bulb flickers in your house, your first guess probably isn’t that there’s a ghost possessing the light fixture.

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Toma said:

Certainly cool idea.

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Messofanego said:

Any word on a release date?

I'm really excited about this, even if the art is kind of basic looking.

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Klendathu Club Owner said:

It's by Kent Hudson who worked on Deus Ex: Invisible War, Thief: Deadly Shadows and Bioshock 2.

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