Next Fest wraps up tonight, and we wanted to share one more update before it ends.
We hit 300+ wishlists this week without any real marketing push behind it. Just players finding the hotel on their own, telling friends about it, leaving feedback, and writing in the discussions. For a two-person team, one developer and one artist, that means a lot. Honestly, reading what you all wrote was the best part of the week.
If you haven't played the demo yet, it's 1937. You're Walter Merrick, the new elevator operator at the Ardmore Hotel. The place has been standing since 1892. It's seen things. The demo's still live for a few more hours of the fest, so if any of this catches your interest, take a shift before the doors close. The job has one rule: stay in the cage. Take guests up. Take them down. Don't wander. But you can leave. The doors aren't locked. Nobody's technically watching. That's the whole game for us, right there. It's not confinement horror, it's curiosity horror. Every step you take outside your post, the hotel either rewards you or punishes you. Sometimes both. And you usually can't tell which is which until it's too late to take it back.
Now we look ahead. The plan from here is to take The Ardmore somewhere much stranger than what you played this week.
Roadmap to Release
Here’s what we’re chipping away at between now and Halloween, or February at the latest:
Five more nights of content. The demo's first night is just the on-ramp. The story gets a lot weirder from there.
Two new mini-games alongside the one you already ran into. Each one starts as a job a 1937 night operator might actually do, and each one falls apart in its own quiet way.
Reworked character models and animations. The work below is just the start of a much bigger pass on how every NPC in the building looks, moves, and reacts. (We've already started.)
Smarter encounters. We're going back through enemy behavior and rewriting the parts where you can read the pattern on the first try. The first encounter in the demo is already getting reworked from the AI up. Horror dies the second you start counting.
Deeper environmental storytelling. Every room has a history. Every guest has a reason for being at the Ardmore on these specific nights. We want you to put it together by paying attention, not by being told. A hallway should be able to tell you what happened in it without a single line of dialogue. That's where we're headed.
Polish across the whole demo, based on what you reported this week. Pacing, audio mixing, elevator UI readability, and those moments where you weren't sure if you were stuck or just supposed to feel uncomfortable.
Full gamepad support.
Expanded accessibility options and a reworked settings menu. Subtitle sizing, visual cues, motion comfort settings, audio sliders that actually do what they say. A lot of your feedback is going straight onto this list.
Voice acting and facial animation. We're working on it. More on that when there's something real to show.
Expanded language support. The full game is aiming for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. This is a story-heavy game, so we're looking for native-speaking translators who actually care about the kind of horror The Ardmore is trying to be. If that sounds like you, hit us up in Discord.
A small team, a fixed date
There are two of us. One developer, one artist. We're aiming for Halloween 2026, with February as the absolute latest. What we can tell you is this: we read everything. Steam discussions, Discord messages, post-stream notes, long emails. All of it gets read, and a lot of it ends up changing our task list, sometimes the same day. If you want to follow along, talk lore, or just see what a paranoid two-person studio looks like from the inside, our Discord is open.
How to help, if you want to
If you played the demo and haven't wishlisted yet, throw the full game on your wishlist. It helps you find us again, and Steam will ping you when it launches.
If you streamed the demo or wrote about it, send us the link. We want to thank you properly.
Found a bug? The Steam Discussions forum is the fastest way to reach us.
Just want to lurk and watch the game come together? Come hang out in Discord. You're welcome there.
Next Fest closes tonight. Five more nights are waiting upstairs.