It started at a New Year's party.
A friend brought over a boxed EXIT game, and I had never played anything like it. Somewhere during that session I started thinking about the format, and specifically about the fact that print-and-play would solve most of the things that bothered me about it. So I decided to make one.
I leaned into the gothic mystery mansion genre, which seemed like a natural fit for an escape room. It was fun to design, and I finished Episode 1, called Legacy, in the spring of 2023. I released it for free, mostly to see if anyone would play it.
People did.
That was three years ago.
Since then, the series has grown to four episodes, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a format experiment and became a story I actually cared about finishing. The Rutherfords, the family at the centre of the manor's history. Victor Aldridge, the art thief whose presence keeps surfacing in unexpected places. Samuel, the mysterious butler. The characters kept pulling me back, and each new episode added another layer to what they were hiding.
Across itch.io and this site, the series has reached above 12,000 downloads. Almost all of that is the free first episode, which is how it should work.
But a small portion of those players have kept going, and that still surprises me a little.
Late last year I released something outside the main series.
The Green Star is a standalone game set in the same universe as Langton Manor, but moved forward to the 1950s. It is a Cold War story with cosmic horror at its centre. The setting and aesthetic are completely different from the manor, but players of both will find the stories are connected.
The Green Star was the first sign, at least to me, that the universe could hold more than one kind of story.
Episode 5 is in progress.
It is the conclusion of the Langton Manor series, and I am writing it as a proper ending rather than a cliffhanger. After five episodes, the story deserves to close.
What comes after that is an open question. But three years of working on one idea has made it clear that there is more than one idea here.
If you have been playing since the beginning, thank you. If you are just finding this, Episode 1 is still free.
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