Demo offers first clues to The Tragedy at Deer Creek 

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Narrative-driven point-and-click "winter noir" mystery adventure coming early next year to Windows PC

History is filled with small towns and remote outposts that have come and gone, the tales of their former inhabitants forever lost to time. It'll be our job to seek out and piece some of those stories together in the upcoming "winter noir" mystery adventure from indie Swedish developer Sparrowland, The Tragedy at Deer Creek.

In the winter of 1997, photographer Charlotte Gray is working on a book called Forgotten Frontiers. Having already documented numerous different "ghost towns throughout the Midwest," her next journey is to "the remote woods of southwest Alaska, to the derelict logging camp at Deer Creek," where she "expects to find the worn remains of a piece of American labor history." When she arrives, however, what she discovers instead is "a place that seems to be eerily frozen in time." Taking great care not to disturb historical remnants wherever possible, Charlotte begins searching for "fragments from the lives of the people who once lived here," dating back well over a hundred years. Slowly but surely, as she "starts to unravel the tragedy that befell Deer Creek and its people, it becomes clear that [it] is harboring numerous secrets, sleeping deep beneath the snow."

The Tragedy at Deer Creek is a fully voiced, first-person slideshow-style adventure with a distinctive pixel art style peppered with cinematic animations. The palette is heavily muted, the wintry environment awash in the gray/blue of a perpetually sunless environment. Gameplay is largely traditional for point-and-click adventures, with a context-sensitive single-click interface, various locations to explore, items to collect and combine, and puzzles to solve to progress. There's more to keep track of here than in many games, however, with separate inventories for usable objects, old letters and other documents, and photos you discover. Once you put film in your Polaroid camera, you'll take many pictures of your own as well, stored in your journal alongside a handy to-do list. Each new detail about the people who once lived here and "their relationships and secrets" fills in more of a "mournful tale of family, loss, and loyalty, exploring the lengths we are willing to go to protect the ones we love."

The full version of The Tragedy of Deer Creek isn't due out until sometime early in 2026, but you can take your first frigid steps into the Alaskan woods right away through the playable demo available on Steam for Windows PC.