Blooming Chasm is my current visual novel project! I got the idea in Spring 2021, and have been working on it (very inconsistently…) ever since.
Check back this page from time to time if you’re interested in my progress. An itch.io download link will be posted here upon release too.
Full Synopsis
A hot summer day in the suburbs of Paris. In the park of the prestigious Lycée Laclos, the class reunion is in full swing, but Stella Sawadogo remains apart, a single thought in mind:
None of this needed to happen.
This isn’t the reality we should be living in, we’re in the wrong place;
we got the worst deal of them all.
Four years ago, twenty graduate students dropped out within a single night. No one seems to know why, nor what became of them afterwards. Even Estée d’Orville, the most talented student of her year, was among them —and not one person has heard of her since.
Stella’s the only remaining one out of twenty. Wasn’t she very close to Estée? They say her eyes haven’t been the same since, that she’s had to rebuild her whole life anew, somewhere abroad.
No one expected to see her again on the day of the class reunion, but there she is. Insisting that none of this needed to happen, that this shouldn’t be the reality we live in —that we got the worst deal of them all.
About the story
Blooming Chasm is a class reunion Gothic horror/mystery visual novel with a hint of urban fantasy.
Over the course of a single summer day, you follow Stella’s return to Lycée Laclos for her class reunion. Through conversations with her classmates and remembrances from four years earlier, you’ll uncover the truth behind dark events no one seems to remember.
The story is inspired by the visual novel Tsukihime, the anime series Shinsekai Yori, the Ghibli movie Ocean Waves, the Korean drama Reply 1997, and plenty of interest in occult horror media.
Blooming Chasm will feature a main lesbian romance (and perhaps a secondary straight romance), but the focus is on the mystery.
The story is planned to be about 100 000 words long, which should take about 4 to 6 hours of reading. It will be fully linear: there will be no choices to make.
Current progress: I’m still working on the first draft, and wrote ~52 000 words, which means I’m about halfway.