Announcing: The Marvelous Raincaster of Yell Holler!

So very excited to share with you the announcement trailer for our latest game: The Marvelous Raincaster of Yell Holler, a time-looping puzzle ballad!

We’ve been working quietly on this one from our little corner of the Ozarks, and it’s become something pretty special. You can wishlist it right now, and in fact, it helps tremendously if you do. Do!

When you’ve done, can we tell you more?

The Game

Raincaster is a puzzle adventure that tells the legend of a weather-making rooster, written in the form of a folk ballad.

As a folklorist visiting the rugged hill country of the Ozarks, your chronicle of local lore is at the mercy of an unreliable storyteller. You’ll need to help sort his wayward ballad by rearranging its stanzas—but even this is not so straightforward. Each stanza you move is also a moment in time: shaped, like most folklore, by what comes before.

As you’ll see in the trailer, much of the gameplay involves moving events (stanzas) in a timeline as you work out how they weave together. Along the way, you’ll also gather scraps of folk wisdom as clues, and:

• Appease a strange cast of hand-drawn and animated characters
• Gain the assistance of a traveling conman salesman
• Orchestrate a shindig and other such matters

The Team

Brooke is creative lead and designer of the project, drawing from the people, setting, and superstitions from her childhood here in rural Arkansas.

David has taken more of a producer role this time around, as he’s working primarily in film these days. But the trailer is his handiwork, along with much of the finesse of the demo we’ll be showing this weekend at EGX (more on that in a bit).

Composer Michael Kirby Ward is responsible for the sheer foot-stomping exuberance you hear in the trailer, paired with the playful audio work of Ben Seavello. You can hear their previous collaboration in last year’s IGF-awarded Hauntii.

We’ve also recently begun working with programmer Dan Fountain and Robert Megone on QA. And we’d be remiss not to mention Kjartan Kennedy’s early prototyping work, which helped us get to this stage.

The Demo

Raincaster will be playable in-person tomorrow, as part of the Leftfield Collection at EGX (Oct. 24–26)! We won’t be there in person, but if you’re lucky you may spot elusive programmer Dan—or at least the handsome controller stand he 3D-printed for Raincaster’s booth.

Again, please, please wishlist the game if you’re on Steam, and help us spread the word! Your friends will like it, probably. Maybe your parents? Certainly possums and all conmen.

Anyway, we think this is very exciting, and hopefully you think so too.

🌧️ David & Brooke