Lately, the Usual June team has been focusing a lot on building Fen Harbor, the fictional town where the game takes place. Fen Harbor is heavily inspired by the midwest, so we asked Finji Co-founders Bekah and Adam Saltsman to tell us why they wanted to place Usual June in a midwest town.
Bekah: I wanted to tell a story about my home and the people who live here. So many of the movies and books in the US take place on the coasts, in cities like Los Angeles or New York, and the culture and stories of the flyover states is largely unrepresented. Our towns, though, have layered histories that were (and still are) colored by hundreds of years of government intervention, capitalist oligarchs, industrialization, and the migration waves of both large international immigrant populations and the resettlement of the freed slaves post-civil war. The midwest is fascinating! Why did they change the flow direction of the Chicago river? Why was Chicago raised 8 feet? How many shipwrecks are on the Great Lakes? Did you know that in 1940 November 50 hunters in the midwest froze to death when the temps dropped too fast in an extreme type winter storm that generally happens every few years? Why are the thunderstorms so violent and the tornadoes so common and huge? What about these midwest cities makes you stay? I wanted to tell a ghost story and what better way to tell that story than to write about our ghosts: both human ghosts and the ghosts of the city which is told through known and forgotten histories.
A sneak peek at a museum the team has been making!
Adam: The short answer is I wanted to place Usual June in the midwest because that's where I grew up and that's where I am raising my own kids.
The slightly longer answer is because the midwest is a really weird rich place to tell stories, especially mystery stories. Time and memory work weird here. Less than a century ago, Detroit and Cleveland were among the most important cities in the world. Growing up in the 1980s, Detroit was mainly known for Robocop, who is not even real (probably). The "now" of cities here can feel like "always", but it isn't... the way the past can disappear here, the way it can be rewritten by barons like Henry Ford, makes it the perfect place to tell a ghost story.
And cities here are kind of architecturally fantastic, like in the sense that they seem like something from an urban fantasy story... did you know Detroit has a massive salt mine under it? Not nearby, not adjacent, like directly underneath it? Don't worry, it's way down there. But that's wild to me. The bedrock below Grand Rapids, where I live, is riddled with gypsum mine tunnels. Tunnels is almost misleading, some of these spaces are subterranean quarries. And every business here is the third or seventh or eleventh thing occupying the same building, like the rings in the trunk of a tree. Level design is easy here.
💜 Thanks for following along with Usual June's development. We've got more to show off, so be sure to wishlist and follow the Usual June page!