Kickstarter materializes for School Night Séance

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Playable demo available for creepy-cute side-scrolling puzzle adventure coming to Windows and Mac

In most adventure games, getting stuck in an eerie old (and almost certainly haunted) mansion is entirely unintentional, but you'll be heading into one with eyes wide open in School Night Séance, an upcoming side-scrolling adventure by indie developer Ghosts in the Garden, who are currently seeking crowdfunding for the project on Kickstarter. 

Melony is an impulsive, precocious high school girl who's constantly urging her eminently practical best friend Letty to join her in extracurricular hijinx, but she conveniently leaves out a key detail about her latest plan to break into the creepy old mansion on the hill. Only once they've arrived does Melony reveal her plot: a "ill-advised séance" to reach the dead! Naturally, the hasty ceremony goes awry, separating the two girls by a supernatural force, and their only clue is "some sort of family album.......a family with an appetite for puzzles." Communicating via walkie-talkies, Melony and Letty will need to "work together to solve puzzles, uncover the mansion's mysterious history, and finally, reunite and escape the house." Complicating matters are the ghosts populating the manor, who "might just need a bit of convincing before they're ready to leave."

Despite the scary-sounding premise, School Night Séance is very much a creepy-cute sort of adventure, inspired by the likes of "genre classics like Maniac Mansion and Myst, as well as newer iterations like Broken Age and Tangle Tower." Designed to offer a "modern take on the point-and-click adventure genre," it combines a delightfully cartoony hand-painted art style with full voice acting and a soundtrack composed with an appropriate sense of "spooky whimsy." What isn't at all modern is the setting itself, as the house is "filled to the brim with old technology; from floppy disks and VHS cassettes, to radios and rotary phones." 

Technically the controls are NOT point-and-click, as the side-scrolling gameplay features an interesting mix of interface elements. You can switch between the girls at will and nagivate them through their own wings of the mansion with either keyboard or gamepad. The mouse is used, too, but only to interact with a small menu in the bottom right that lets you inspect or examine items or the environment, check notes, use and combine inventory, and call up a map to orient yourself. Across 25 unique rooms there will be plenty of ghosts to help (with the aid of Melony’s flashlight to reveal them), puzzles to solve and optional collectibles as well, such as phone numbers to dial for "fun skits and special dialogue. If you get stuck, Vic the crow is never far away, though his guidance comes at a price. 

In order to complete School Night Séance by October 2026, the developers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise €15,000 by December 3rd. To introduce players to the project first-hand, a playable demo is available now on Steam and itch.io for Windows and Mac, offering a sneak peek at eight of the rooms in the full game to come.