Hey!
I’m Yakov Butuzov and I’d like to present to you the game I’m working on — Loretta. It’s a psychological thriller that makes the player an accessory to the heroine’s crimes and leads her through a self-crafted nightmare.
And there’s a new demo available on Steam!
You could have already read my posts about the plot and the main inspirations for the game, so now it’s time to update you on the progress I made. I’m mostly making Loretta alone, so trying to understand the expectations of the audience is quite difficult, as well as corresponding to them. But I’d like to know what people want to get from the game like this and, hopefully, make it happen.
Loretta is a story-driven adventure game. Its gameplay focuses on choosing dialogue options, interacting with objects, and making decisions: planning the murder(s) and getting rid of the evidence.
There are several endings, too. You shouldn’t expect tremendous variability in such a game, but the most important thing for me is to give the player the possibility to either lead events into a thin web of dodgy lies or a series of murders that will push the heroine into the abyss of madness.
It’s the year 1947. Loretta and Walter Harris are moving to a farm. Into his parent’s house. Walter is a writer, Lora is a housewife. Both are quite unsuccessful. Moreover, Walter’s cheating.
Loretta starts to understand that she gave up her dreams, her job and her life for a failure of a husband she doesn’t even love. She finds herself in an empty cold house without a livelihood. And as she struggles to make loan payments, she finds out that Walter’s publishing house has insured his life. In case of his death or disappearance, the bank will pay out 30.000$. A plan is born in Lora’s mind.
So let me confess, I am in love with this era. Everything about it makes me love it passionately: the car design, interiors, clothes, "streamline" elements, culture, music (Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Al Bowlly, The Ink Spots, Vera Lynn and others.)
However, Loretta is not a documentary. The name of the state in which the action takes place is not mentioned by design. It is a metaphysical place, refracted through the prism of Loretta's fading consciousness. You will be travelling through the hub of Loretta's memories, and you’ll have to solve a puzzle or a mini-game to unlock new parts of the story.
In the development, the main challenge for me is creating an unusual heroine. Loretta does horrible things during the game, and you can influence the severity of them. Each decision you make will have consequences.
Sooner or later in life, every person faces betrayal, poverty, and other challenges of fate. Everyone tries to settle them in their own way, but what if one goes all-in? Loretta dears to try.
It’s a story of a person fighting with their desires. It’s about frustration, lies, betrayal, relationships between man and woman, creativity, crimes, mysteries and even… love.
I’m not going to lie, the game turns out quite unusual. It has a distinctive style. II myself am slowly falling in love with the heroine, although she behaves like a damn brute. In the entire game, Loretta can kill fewer people than the main character of any shooter on the first level only. And my task here is to make the story feel exciting and interesting.
I invite you to play a free demo of Loretta on Steam and write a review. I read everything and will highly appreciate it as it will help me make the game better!
Thank you!