The commission
A fire that left no trace
I built DUES as a story-driven horror game in RPG Maker. A maid named Aodhgan asks Dues to find the owner of a manor after a fire. When he arrives, the furniture and wallpaper show no signs of burning. His assistant Megan already seems to know where to go, and Dues himself finds the house strangely familiar. I wanted the player to have reasons to distrust the story before finding anything supernatural.
Behind the commission is a town that disappeared thirty years earlier, with no survivors. A month before the disaster, the manor’s youngest daughter Dolly found a book of magic and accidentally performed a summoning that cursed the town. The manor kept burning until a priest sealed it. I reveal that history through the rooms and the objects the family left behind.
Characters and testimony
Who knows the house?
I used portraits and short conversations to separate what each character says from what their actions suggest. Megan knows the way to the garden; Harmon claims to know the owner; Kingsley knows there is something in an attic that should have been locked. Dolly is the person everyone circles around, but the character sheet leaves her face unseen.
- Dues
- A detective from a small town who can sometimes see ghosts. Aodhgan hires him to find out what happened to the owner of the manor.
- Megan
- Dues’s neighbour and assistant. She joins the investigation and seems unusually familiar with the layout, particularly the route to the garden.
- Harmon
- A visitor met at the front door who says he is an old friend of the owner. Later, he knocks at the chapel while something is pursuing him.
- Aodhgan
- The maid who reports the fire and the family’s disappearance. Inside the house, she appears as a ghost; her diary records changes in Dolly and the family.
- Kingsley
- The doll shop owner. He took in Dolly’s doll for repair; she never came back for it, so he went to the manor to look for her.
- Dolly
- The youngest daughter of the manor family. I kept her as a silhouette on the cast sheet; the player first comes to know her through her doll, notes and other people’s accounts.
Rooms, clues and decisions
Plant a clue before it has a use
I start in the main lobby. The fireplace has two empty round grooves, but the player does not yet have anything to put in them. The early branches lead to the gardener’s notebook, old matches in the entertainment room and the maid’s notebook in a locked drawer. The maid also gives Dues a chapel key. The chapel holds a book about magic and ritual with a page missing. The clues are spread across different rooms so that returning to a familiar space can change what it means.
The route asks whom to trust
In the garden, whether Dues tries to save Megan is one hidden condition. In the upstairs corridor, Aodhgan passes through a wall by the kitchen; inside, Dues finds a knife and opens Dolly’s repaired doll to get her room key. A many-eyed creature then chases Dues as far as the chapel. Whether to open the door to Harmon becomes a second hidden condition. I placed the decisions inside encounters so that they arise from the player’s reading of the characters.
Kingsley sends Dues toward the library, where a piece of clockwork picked up in town opens the way behind the floor clock. In the attic, the gardener’s note helps the player recognise a glass bead hidden in the flesh, and the missing page explains that fire can break the rite. In Dolly’s room, a coded bedside box holds the second bead and a note. A later chase gives the old matches a purpose, as Dues hears Dolly ask for fire. Back in the lobby, the two beads fit the fireplace grooves and reveal the way below.
In-game scenes and script
The manor in play
The RPG Maker view lets the same rooms do two things: give the player a route to read, and hold details that come back later. The portraits identify the speaker while the top-down view keeps their position in the house visible. Here are the lobby, garden and chapel, alongside the conversations and observations that shape the investigation.
From script to encounter
In the script, I move between what the characters say and what the player is doing: checking the lobby, splitting up, trying the locked chapel door and finding notebooks in different rooms. The scene directions keep those discoveries attached to places and actions.
Read the original script (PDF) ↗
Three endings
I separated finding the way to the altar from understanding what is happening there. The two beads open the route; the hidden conditions depend on what the player did earlier. Kingsley’s invitation in the private room provides the last test, where Dues can choose whether to use the knife to test him.
Reveal the endings and the mirror scene
- The Fire · Normal ending
- Without both glass beads, the hidden route stays closed. Dues burns the house.
- Offering · Bad ending
- Dues reaches the underground altar, but one or more of the hidden conditions are still unmet.
- Liberate · True ending
- With all hidden conditions met, examining the altar restores awareness and Dues wakes in reality.
What the mirror gives away
Dues is also the name of the curse, and Dolly and the curse share one existence. After the priest sealed the town, they fell into a deep sleep. The new rite at the underground altar trapped Dues in a recurring dream, where the curse gradually wore Dolly down. Her plea for fire is a request for release. I used the mirror to bring the detective and Dolly together in one image and ask what it would mean to wake the curse.
The maid’s diary gives that reveal a trail to follow: Dolly’s eyes were silver, but one slowly turned red. Dolly gave her mother one of the two originally clear beads that fell from the magic circle. The gardener saw a round object lodged in the lady’s body that she seemed not to notice. The curse turns Dolly’s parents into monsters; the mother becomes the unrotting flesh in the attic, while the many-eyed creature brings the curse into the chase.
Visual and narrative references
A loop and a house full of clues
My reference board brought together horror RPGs and films. I looked at how familiar places can become threatening, how a repeating sequence can change the meaning of earlier scenes, and how limited information can make the player question the role they think they are playing.