Greetings Obscurants, Magicians and other players of the occult.

We come bearing news regarding Occlude. First, if you haven't seen, we're releasing on July 10th, a mere matter of weeks now.

Second, we've now taken down the Demo as our full attention has turned to that (very close) launch date.

And most importantly we've been hard at work going through your feedback and tightening up the last screws on our unsettling little creature of a game.

Let's dive into some launch features and point out a few key differences from the Demo.

Starting with...

You will now get a choice between playing Occlude on CLASSIC MODE or STORY MODE. This option appears at the beginning of the game and again before you start a Ritual.

In Classic Mode:

• You play Occlude as we intended; Difficult but not impossible. Careful planning will be necessary and we expect you'll need a few New Deals before you complete a Ritual fully.

• You'll get a limited Undo, where once you place a card on the Foundation, you cannot Undo any further. Our single free cell for cards, Purgatory, will still be there to assist.

• You get access to a handful of extra Achievements as a reward for leaping in without a safety net.

In Story Mode:

• You get the entire narrative experience of Occlude. No story content is locked behind Classic Mode and never will be.

• You get an unlimited Undo, which works even if you place cards on the Foundation, and two Purgatory slots that will help you shift cards around more easily.

• Story Mode has a totally different, easier set of RNG seeds compared to Classic Mode. The game will still be a challenge but the experience will be less punishing.

Here's Story Mode in action:

So if you're a hardcore Solitaire fan who enjoys difficult games, choose Classic Mode.

And if you want the experience of Occlude minus the frustration, choose Story Mode.

Game difficulty was the biggest feedback point from our Demo. For every two people asking "please make Occlude easier!", another would beg "don't change the difficulty!"

This solution took a lot of work but hopefully will please both camps. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

On top of making new, easier RNG seeds for Story Mode, we changed the code that creates them and crafted a new bank of seeds for you to play with.

When Occlude launches every deal you get, whether it's in Story or Classic Mode, for each of the Rituals, will be solveable and solveable for any combination of final cards.

Our Demo had every game solveable for all deals but not for all final cards. We'd envisioned players experimenting, getting stuck and happily hitting "New Deal" plenty of times before completing a Ritual fully.

That's just not how people want to play the game! Which is fair, so we've gone ahead and made this change.

On top of this we've upped the total number of RNG seeds for launch, with over 1,400 possible seeds split between Story and Classic Mode - meaning more replayability for you.

Plenty of players asked for more narrative as well as rewards for completing a Ritual with four coins. We secretly already have this - The Archives.

We left out these from the Demo as we were keen not the spoil them, but it's worth talking about them now.

If you complete a Ritual with four coins in any Mode, you'll get access to that Ritual's Archive Object and Archive Document.

The object appears on the table (see above) and selecting it brings up its document (see below).

(Note we've redacted this document a little for Steam - The version in game will have a fair bit more information for you)

The narrative of Occlude is designed to be a puzzle in itself - Piecing documents together as you play, slowly understanding more of our world's lore, and eventually revealing the deep, terrible secrets behind Occlude.

We also have different text endings for getting no coins, less than four coins and four coins. Revisiting Rituals to get these outcomes will reveal even more narrative and these will be easier to compare thanks to User Interface changes we're doing for launch (see below).

We're keen to see tables fill up with objects earned and hear your theories on launch day.

We're launching with Seven Rituals that steadily increase in difficulty.

If you played the Demo you've seen the first three already, but the next four are very different beasts. We expect you to complete those considerably slower as they ramp up in complexity.

We have plans for more Rituals, however the work we had to do for Story Mode and for other features means they won't be present at launch.

It's a shame but we're a tiny team of two developers right now. We have to pick our battles, so are regretfully putting those in the back pocket.

We've also been collating feedback on individual Rituals and want to integrate that with any future work we do. Please bear with!

We've massively improved information on your previous games - What cards you should have placed in a session, how well you did on previous games, what endings you've unlocked, as well as the ability to revisit those endings.

We also heard your feedback about the coins not being clear enough and these have A) increased in size and B) have all new improved artwork with thicker lines and higher contrast:

Beyond that we've made a ton of small visual improvements to better increase readability. We're working on adding more screen sizes also, though this may happen after launch.

This is already a mammoth post so we'll finish with the last few Launch features:

• New improved tutorial that teaches the rules of the game better

• Updated music and foley

• Updated the start game room with some final touches

• Work for Cloud Saves and Achievements

• An improved intro screen to let you know what you're letting yourself in for...

If there's a particular feature you want to zoom in on, leave a message in the comments below. Thanks for playing, thanks for giving feedback and/or thanks for reading.

One last thing - If you haven't wishlisted Occlude yet, please consider it.

As we said, we're a tiny indie team with a tiny indie publisher, and getting the word out is increasingly difficult on Steam.

Your wishlist tells the algorithm "this game's not terrible" and shows more people Occlude to consider.

If you want to do your good deed for the day, why not hit that little button below?

See you in the next post.

https://cs2bus.com/steamstore/app/3547010/Occlude

I've had this melody stuck in my head all day. An earworm of unknown origin. A sound playing on repeat, but only in my mind. And only when I'm at the Table. And so I've transcribed it - committed the melody to notation. This is new evidence[table.pantaloon.io].

The sound feels both close and distant at the same time. It carries a sadness. A weight. Despite this, I know I must track it down.
Where. WHERE is it from. This is the information I need.

--

The world

is a broken machine.