The Severed Hours

The Severed Hours began as my spouse approached the end of their final PhD class. I wanted to create a gift that would celebrate the end of their in-class era, and which would push my boundaries as a creator. I'd never created a game before, so that seemed like an entertaining direction to try.

The result is The Severed Hours, a little game obviously inspired by a number of things, which tries to tell the story of a person awakening both to themself and to our relationship with the mystery of the world. I set it in a kind of noir corporate environment, as one does, and filled it with inside jokes/references that maybe serve to heighten the sense of mystery/otherness more than just creating and offputting strangeness? We'll see.

The game is listed as in its final form, which this version more or less is. The next time it's released will be after porting it to the SOBORNOST engine I created after figuring out I was addicted to making these games. It will include fixes of some of the quirks still present in the game, but I will probably not make many changes to gameplay. The porting/v2.0 experience will be mostly a backend thing, a practice for me.

Theological Foundations

Pretty simple theological stuff going on here, I guess, pretty up-front. You'll see some play with ideas of awareness, kenosis, charisms, attention, process, liberation, self/no-self, otherness/holiness. I hope I've kept it all accessible and not made an annoyance of myself. Players not interested in a little theological flavour probably will have no grounds to ever find this game, and those looking for something doctrinaire in their theology have no reason to try a game exploring theological ideas, because they have it all figured out and have nothing to explore (congratulations!)