Time to learn about Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Classic retro-styled point-and-click adventure set in a mysterious abbey unveiled for Windows and Mac

Part of the fun of any mystery is getting the guilty parties to talk, but what do you do when all your persons of interest have vowed never to do precisely that? This will be the challenge facing players in Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence, an upcoming retro-styled adventure by Making Enemies' solo developer Ayose Trujillo and his music and sound collaborator Antonio Vozmediano. 

William is a "young, curious, and impulsive writer" who needs inspiration for his first novel. He hopes to find it in an old remote abbey that was once "a place of song, home to the Schola Cantorum and its abbot, a musical genius who led choirs that echoed through its stone halls." That all changed when the abbot "suddenly lost his mind and imposed an absolute vow of silence on all the monks." Even years after the abbot's death, "the vow remains, leaving the abbey in the deepest silence." Buried within the quiet, however, among "cold walls, echoes of lost chants, and unsolved mysteries," lies "a chilling enigma" – a  secret "that was never meant to be discovered." For William, what "begins as a simple literary quest" soon becomes a determined pursuit of the unspoken truth. 

Designed to be just the first game in an ongoing Scholar Adventure series, Mystery of Silence is being created using PowerQuest, the proprietary engine behind Powerhoof's superb The Drifter earlier this year. As with that game, this one features a simple point-and-click interface with atmospheric pixel art graphics "inspired by the graphic adventures of the 1990s." Promising a "deep narrative and touches of black humor," the game will have plenty of items to collect, puzzles to solve, and monks to meet and... well, meet, anyway, though the entire experience will be a relatively short one, with a projected play time of approximately two hours to reach the end. 

There is no firm target release date just yet, but if all goes well we should see Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence launch on Steam for Windows and Mac sometime before the end of this year, with a playable demo available during the Steam Next Fest in October.