I released paravalence ~with my angel, a linear visual novel (alternatively, a ‘sound novel’), on January 19, 2026. It’s available on Steam, itch.io, and JAST USA.
I really am quite proud of it. It was a big undertaking, one tied into several disparate eras of my life and their respective focusses of study, on and off since 2023. In retrospect, it’s strange I never made a post about it here; and so I’ve decided it would be best to talk a little about the game for those of you visiting.
What is it about?
This is the first question anyone asks, and I find myself stumped each time because it’s not really one story with an initial hook. It’s three.
- A girl, coming of age, runs from her parents’ expectations and the judgment of her classmates, accidentally encountering and following an older woman in a kimono who lives to hunt and kill, becoming her apprentice.
- A man tries to deal with the arcane and macabre demands dealt to him by an androgynous figure in his head while protecting his sister after strange incidents occur in town.
- A clairvoyant and a druid create a strange world between them where everything is magic and anything is possible while sensing the remnants of former rituals.
Each story rhymes with (and directly ties into) the others, gradually unveiling the world’s mechanics. Each story is also about the length of a feature film, taking about ~6 hours in all, though I’ve seen some players take up to 10 hours.
And how was it made?
With the help of many people! ccherias did the character art and made so many contributions to the design of the game and the world. Riley and Celeste provided the music and their soundtrack is enormous – 90 minutes, across 50 tracks.
I have an acknowledgements file alongside the game but I also owe a lot to the developer tooling my friend Merilynn pioneered for iteration.
The actual story entered planning in 2023, around the end of my tenure in Vancouver. Around late 2023 the UI design got put into place; early 2024, we finished act 1, but I had to shelve the project until 2025, when I wrote the following two acts from May - August, getting the remaining assets together and polishing the game September - October, making the box art and posters around late October, getting story editing from November to release (courtesy my partner) and then finally getting through the release process and all paperwork.
If you do check it out, I hope you find it enjoyable!