Rose Cottage shows first signs of life

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Announcements by Jack Allin
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Hand-drawn point-and-click mystery set inside a Victorian-era mortuary in development for PC

A mortuary tends to be rather a eerie place at the best of times, but imagine how much more so if all of its employees suddenly disappeared. Indie developer Hollow Lane Games is imagining it, at least, and will present the answer to this unusual mystery in the upcoming point-and-click adventure, Rose Cottage.

It's November 10, 1910, when Detective Inspector Edward Barrington receives a call from his wife about her distressed father, Thomas Gray. Thomas runs the Hollow Lane Mortuary – or did, until all three of his employees went missing without a trace at the same time. The incident has so upset him that he's closed the posh mansion up tight and can no longer stand to be there, so it's up to Edward to find answers. Believing it to be just another simple missing persons case, Edward bypasses the locked front door and makes his own way inside to investigate. He soon discovers, however, that there's "much more to the disappearances" than he originally thought, and before long he finds himself caught up in "a night he will never forget."

Rose Cottage is a classic-styled adventure with beautifully hand-drawn and animated hi-res locations to explore, from the ornate dining room with a roaring fire in the fireplace to the gloomy cellar where the coffins are kept. Characters are all voiced with appropriately British accents for a Victorian-era mystery, with original background music providing a suitably haunting accompaniment. There will certainly be things that go bump in the night to give Edward a fright, but this is less a horror game than a traditional adventure with a two-button interface, clues to find, items to collect, and a variety of both inventory and logic puzzles to solve along the way.

It's still too early in production for a release date just yet, but Rose Cottage is already available for wishlisting on Steam for Windows PC.