Dear Villains and Villainesses,
This is Tanya and Emily, the dynamic duo behind Save the Villainess, wishing you a great start to 2026! Though the weather may or may not be chilly where you are (personally, we’re freezing!), we hope you have much good fortune ahead of you. We’re here to celebrate Servant’s birthday, share our game progress, and share our focus on mysteries. Plus this month, our mailing list is offering cards that share what our characters expect to experience in the coming year. Will you be as optimistic, or grimly determined to survive, as them?
This month, we're celebrating the birthday of Servant, our extremely-normal and not-at-all-unsettling butlermaid! Beyond Rui’s gorgeous commissioned artwork of them, we have the following message containing their preferred present.
Won’t you do them a favor and listen in?
We started off this year with a bang! First off, we programmed the complex and intertwined scenes 33, 34, and 35. Scene 33 contains an interesting romantic choice while we set up a new animation involving a new art asset for scene 34. We won’t say much more… only that if it puts a chill down your spine, we did our job. We also completed programming for scene 35, which will take Jane to the next area and which contains a significant amount of conditional dialogue based on your choices.
Finally, one of these scenes contains a complex animation sequence containing Edmund’s new action character model, which took about 20 hours of work to complete. Now that we have it working though, you'll find that Edmund is capable of many new maneuvers, including...
The brandishing of ominous letters, which may or may not hold vital clues!
We also reviewed our existing outlines of Scenes 36 to 40. These scenes are very complex and important ones that bring back a returning fan favorite character in a new environment replete with its own mysteries and revelations. Jane will learn some very important information about the original Lady Jane Neville. We reviewed these scenes to make sure our writing properly conveys character details and lore, even as we worked toward an important mystery deduction sequence.
Additionally, we wrote out scenes 36, 37, and 38. We focused on adding more interactions and love choices between Jane and a certain love interest. Want to know more about how this love interest deals with the horrors in their life, as well as how this love interest seeks to prepare Jane for future horrors? You’ll find out much more in this section, especially if you’re bold enough to try out both the affection-raising and affection-lowering love choices. Remember - both choices reward you with completely different skits and different information on the characters!
This month, we also took part in Steam Detective Fest 2026. After all, though Save the Villainess is a game that allows you to find love and fulfillment in nine different happy endings, you can only do so after you have foiled several dozen murder attempts. So if you’re up for solving mysteries, including that of your own murder, come join us at Detective Fest!
If you’re interested in more romantic murder mysteries, remember that you can always read our free prequel novel, The Villainess Wants Her Prince to Live, either online, in this PDF, or in this ebook. If you enjoy mysteries, villainesses, politics, assassination attempts, and a princely fiancé with the survivability of a goldfish, you’ll enjoy this tale!
Thanks again for joining us for another month, dear friend. We look forward to surprising you next month with a special Valentine’s Day treat!
Finally, remember you can always find us at the various sites below:
✦ Our discord server - come chat with us and hear what other players have discovered about our game!
✦ Our mailing list - we send out cute kitten pictures and free cards featuring new banter from our main characters every month. This month, the characters share what they expect from the coming year!
✦ Youtube, Bluesky, and Tumblr - our main social media accounts.
✦ Our Free Prequel Novel - The Villainess Wants Her Prince to Live! - Available Online, as a PDF, and an Ebook file
With Fondest Affection,
Tanya & Emily