Grave Seasons lets you date a serial killer who is haunting your beautiful city
Nothing says romance like the imminent threat of death — either to your love or the one they’re targeting for their next kill.
Grave Seasons is the studio’s first game from Perfect Garbage Studios, which I tried out at last year’s Summer Game Fest in a sneak peek of a Stardew Valley-like farming game with a murderous killer running amok. At this year’s SGF, I got my second look at a new demo that revealed a lot about how the game’s more brutal mechanics of investigating and preventing future deaths work.
Naturally, fans of the upcoming game, published by Blumhouse Games and due out later this year, are looking for more than murder. So I asked story director Emmett Nahil for all he could share about what it’s like to date the villagers in Grave Seasons — and yes, that includes dating a murderer.
With over half an hour of playtime, a few hours into the game, the second demo revealed more of how Grave Seasons works. As it was known before, it is not a story of one person — you can repeat the game endlessly, the serial killer is distributed among the citizens. The demo revealed a little more about how these runes will work, although there’s still a lot that Perfect Garbage hasn’t revealed, and it’s still unclear what killing, romance, farming and growing the village of Ashenridge will look like.
In the new demo, I learned about the flow of the standard pass, which consists of four seasons, each lasting 30 days of in-game time that is tracked by a calendar like in the Persona game series. During the month, there are big, non-stop events that involve the whole town, as well as some optional ones — and while you might miss out on talking to a nice person, it’s also a great time for crime.
The game begins with your character aiming to escape from imprisonment, and while lying on the ground, you use the trusty crowbar to enter an empty farm to stay. After that, you can use that tool for other illegal business — that is, breaking into townspeople’s houses for illegal investigations. Since the killer is full, you can’t take chances.
At this spring game event at PAX East, Perfect Garbage was pleasantly surprised to see that the players were not shy about the dark work, immediately wanting to break and enter, suggesting that they are ready to “be a little bit drunk, a little bit amoral sometimes” for a good reason, said Nahil. This association with crime should set his game apart from others with more healthy, law-abiding tones. Grave Seasons aims to scratch a different itch.
“Everyone likes to read things they shouldn’t read. I think the feeling of listening to gossip and digging up secrets is what attracts a lot of people to the story,” said Nahil. “We definitely depend on the game, even without the killing.”
Hacking the secrets of the village
In my demo, I met the sweet, burly man Hari shortly after “accepting” my farm, and wandered into the village to break into his house, as Nahil had suggested. Also, in his bathroom there was a weird looking crystal bathtub, which I stole — I needed it to juice the secret machine in the basement of my adoption farm. This device allows me to combine strange ingredients to create arcane recipes that will repel the killer and protect one potential victim at a time.
These “banners,” as Nahil calls them, are some of the game’s biggest mechanics. It’s not a whodunit to find the killer — it’s fun to see how the city develops, especially if you choose not to save the townspeople.
“Once you’ve seen a murder or two, you can easily tell what kind of creature they are, so we want to focus on that deterrence or lack thereof and how that changes the city itself,” Nahir said.
In the demo scenario I played, the player character comes to the mayor’s office — which has turned into a nasty scene.
What “kind of creature” is the key phrase there, as the killers will be one of many kinds of supernatural creatures. In a demo last year, I saw a huge wolf-like monster in the shadows with red eyes tearing apart a citizen. Nahir hinted that some of those antidotes would follow common mythic associations — for example, conjuring silver, which many legends suggest is effective against werewolves and vampires — but it was not specified.
The assassin will never target the player, but can be contacted. Although you’re not playing a detective tracking down a killer in Grave Seasons, “you have choices and consequences,” Nahil suggested: “Dealing with a killer in these times is about how well you’re prepared, not whether you can successfully pick a particular conversation tree. You can’t really roll excitement to make the killer stop.”
“They’re on their own, and they have their own history, and they have their own reasons for killing, so you can’t talk your way into what’s going on,” Nahil said.
What you can talk about is the hearts of other villagers.
Love in the time of murder
When death invades the town of Grave Seasons, the romance changes depending on who the killer is — including whether you fall in love with him accidentally or on purpose, Nahil said.
“We like to show the diversity and diversity in our game based on who the killer is at the time,” said Nahil. “We like to show a lot of variety and a lot of repetition in the selection of players, even in our love styles.”
Nahil and Perfect Garbage have a lot to say at this point, including the number of romances that can happen between the villagers — not all of them will be open to romance. But among those that exist, they will fall into the charms of the player regardless of which gender presentation is chosen in the creation of characters (from what I saw in this demo, there are a variety of body types, hair types and so on that can be mixed and matched without limitation). This equates to what is commonly known as “homosexuality” which does not limit romantic options to certain sexes, while also dismissing rural people who are unavailable or unwilling.
“We are keeping an eye on that lake [of romance options] really depending on the complexity of the story and accountability [variation] if you fall in love with a murderer,” said Nahil.
And there’s romance with the killer, which is rare in games — but not in other media, like romance books, movies and TV shows. The rise of passion for that twisted love scent fueled the devs of Perfect Garbage.
“Dark romance is a big draw in games and different media, so we’re happy to welcome those gamers and people who want to explore something a little more edgy, a little more controversial in romance,” Nahil said.
