C O V E N
Coven is a visual novel/puzzle game I’ve been working on for a couple years.
You play as Willow “Will” Elfin, an introverted high school student who begins to learn magic after finding an item left behind by a dead creature. Will shares her discoveries with her childhood best friend, Brynn, as an attempt to save their dying friendship. However the more magic they learn, the more their repressed emotions towards each other start to manifest in reality, forcing them to either confront their feelings—or—fight harder to push them back down, becoming monstrous versions of themselves.
Explore Will’s town, meet other magic users (witches), and solve puzzles to learn more about the nature of magic.
Will and Brynn
These two have a complex relationship and I thought their designs should reflect that. They each have very different personalities, but they’ve also known each other for years and are very close. Keeping this in mind, I chose to give them designs that share a lot of elements (side ponytail, skirts, off shoulder shirts, etc) while still being very distinct in colour palette and style.
Will is introverted, isolated and creative, so she tends to hide in baggy clothes and mend her worn out items instead of buying new ones. On the other hand, Brynn is a bit insecure with a drive to social climb, so she’s trendier with newer clothes while just missing the mark of true popularity.
Talismans
Made of objects with great emotional significance to their owners, talismans give witches their power. They cast spells that fit the emotional theme. For example, the talisman Will picks up is greatly linked to death and afterlife, and it can cast spells that commune with the dead, see beyond the veil, and perhaps more…. earning its moniker as the ghost talisman.
Each component was important to the witch who created it, and had some connection to death in her mind.
Locations
Eelgrass Cove is meant to be a coastal town. A place that used to have a lot of industry but nowadays is full of retired people, teenagers leaving for university, and adults stuck in dead-end jobs. Will and Brynn are in their final year of school before university, where they’ll move to new cities without each other. I wanted it to feel lonely, kind of ill-maintained, atmospheric and tense.
Will lives in an old house with her father, and she’s alone a lot of the time. Her room is on the top floor, a messy explosion of childhood furniture and nerd paraphernalia. By contrast, the computer room is in the basement: a dusty storage space full of unopened boxes, DVDs and board games. I wanted both to be secluded and dark, but Will’s room is a place of safety, and the basement is a place where you’d never notice someone behind you until it too late.
Websites
Will learns more about magic and talismans from a mysterious website, and she spends a lot of time on the internet. This is sort of my love letter to alternate reality games like Cicada 3301 and Gemini Home Entertainment, as well as sites I used to visit as a kid. Those types of things are more fun to solve yourself, which is why Coven is a game and not a comic. I did a lot of research on 90’s and early 2010’s websites to create the sites Will visits, and as the game continues there will be more emphasis on site-hopping to solve puzzles, possibly even with video content.
