YoIn the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, the team at Lemonade Games found themselves in a rental house nestled between two vintage shops. With a former antiques professional in their midst and years of game-making experience between them, the idea for the studio’s esoteric adventure game began to take shape. “We spent the week conceptualizing, making art, taking photos, watching movies, and prototyping,” says creative director Ally McLean Hennessey. “It was a very organic way to start shaping a game, and the spirit of that week is reflected in how we work together now.”
In Mystiques: Haunted Antiques, described by its creators As “a game about the four worst women you’ve ever met running a failing antiques shop,” players step into the platform sneakers of a fashionista and business owner, Gem, who struggles to run a failing curio-preserving business. Harnessing some newly acquired and vocationally convenient psychic powers, Gem pierces the veil between life and death, seeking out treasures of high-quality merchandise. “Players will go out to work in the homes of the recently deceased, estate sales, and the like, seeking out haunted items and using the information they gain from communing with their spirits to find and bring back the most valuable items to sell,” says McLean Hennessey. From rope-bound gaming magazines and lava lamps to cursed vases, you’ll inspect and inventory all manner of arcane knick-knacks as you go.
Gem will be joined by a small cast of troubled and lovable prima donnas. “The women of Mystiques are partly inspired by the wave of con artists, scam artists and divas of the late 2010s and early 2020s, such as Anna Delvey, Caroline Calloway and Elizabeth Holmes,” notes Ally. “I can’t help but be drawn to them, partly because there’s a sick thrill in watching people behave badly, but also a part of me has a genuine fondness for them… to exist as someone who can somehow mentally remove herself from the psychodrama of being alive as a woman today to such an extent that she can commit heinously selfish and indulgent acts, and still consider herself morally superior… that sounds very liberating. Maybe they’re onto something.”
Mystiques: Haunted Antiques takes its paranormal cues from tulpamancy, a practice that stems from Tibetan Buddhism and has inspired other strange and creepy media like David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks. “Tulpamancy now exists primarily as a subreddit of people who are interested in the line between what’s ‘real’ and what’s ‘imaginary,’ says McLean Hennessey. “There are plenty of people who believe they can manifest an entity through belief and will, and we’re interested in them just as we’re interested in the con women of our current cultural moment. People who can construct the reality they want to exist in for themselves. Who are we to tell them what’s real?”
McLean Hennessey blends inspiration from great Italian horror films like Suspiria with girlcore flicks like Jennifer’s Body and makes it clear that Mystiques: Haunted Antiques is not a cozy game in the contemporary sense. “We’re exploring a story of psychic anguish, and these filmmakers knew how to do it in a glamorous, elegant, and indulgent way that we really love and that inspires us,” they say. This strange and refreshing mix of influences extends to the soundtrack (which follows the brief: what if a 70s crime thriller had a hyperpop soundtrack?) and also to the game’s fashion, inspired by quirky and fun brands like Schiaparelli and Moschino.
Lemonade Games is keen to imbue the fantasy setting with plenty of vulnerability and authenticity, drawing on a wellspring of personal experience to create a game that McLean Hennessey sees as an expression of the studio’s soul. “If the people we’re making this game for see some element of themselves, their friendships, their experience of the world in this game and can get some relief, some laughs, or a sense of catharsis from playing it… that would mean a lot to us.”