The Lantern House

The idea

You inherit a crumbling inn on the headland above Gull Bay from a great-aunt you met twice. The will says to keep it open for one summer season, four weeks, and pay off her $2,800 loan by Sunday the 28th, or the bank sells the house to a developer.

On the first night you find out why there are no guests. Four former residents never left: they're bound to the rooms they died in and have forgotten who they were. Restoring a room jogs its ghost's memory, so fixing the inn and helping its ghosts are the same job.

What it is

• Days earn money: odd jobs on the quay, dawn fishing with Rosa, and weekend guests at the front desk
• Evenings at the ledger: each upgrade restores a room (the kitchen, three guest rooms, the parlour, the cellar bar, the lantern room), opens a job or a place, and starts a quest line
• Nights belong to the ghosts: Agnes the cook, Marguerite the 1920s singer, Eli the gambler who lost the inn at cards, and Tobias, the lantern's keeper, who drowned in the storm of 1952
• The living: Rosa the fisher, who doesn't believe in ghosts, Henrik from the bank, Juni the paranormal vlogger and Mavis the birdwatcher, who has had Room Two every summer for years
• Charm, Craft and Nerve to train, with fishing, dinner-service, diving and rowing minigames
• Five endings, from Everyone Stays and Everyone Moves On to selling up, foreclosure and a secret one that starts in the attic

Built with

• Ren'Py 8.5.3, on the engine shared with Second Floor, Pinewater and the other Ren'Py games
• The story is written as data in a JavaScript browser prototype and exported to Ren'Py, and a validator plays thousands of simulated runs to check that every scene and ending can be reached
• Drawn art for now, with the prompts for the painted pass ready
• Written and built with Claude Code

Status

In development, at version 0.1. Week one and the finale are written in full; the later weeks are short stand-ins so the whole season plays through and every ending can be reached. Not released yet.