Canary

A marriage promised.
Doors slammed shut on an eight-bedroom estate and my entire dowry.
A collar at my throat.
A cage in a whorehouse.
In this place built for in and out, I want out.
But what do these gilded men give a shit about?
Their precious Canary is dead.

Oh, yes, and let's not forget my latest financial burden:
The stranger on my floor.

                              

About the demo

• Genre: slow-burn gothic romance visual novel
• Story type: kinetic (no choices)
• Length: about 1 hour (~12k words)
• Language: English, with a sprinkle of French
• Rating: 18+ (see below for content warnings)

Features

• Sharp tongues and gallows humour.
• A Belle Époque–inspired fantasy city of sun mages, cabarets and oubliettes.
• Mixed-media art hand-built from vintage photographs and halftone grit.
• Novel-style prose, one line per click, in a scrolling log with portraits instead of text boxes.
• A moody soundtrack and layered sound design.
• Free, always.

Click for content warnings (mature themes, no explicit sexual content). 

Sexual themes: sex-work setting (non-explicit), sexual harassment, coercion, slurs and slut-shaming, humiliation, brief non-sexual nudity

Violence: blood and injury, a knife held to the throat, near-drowning

Other: death wishes said in anger, drug use and dependency (fantasy substance), alcohol, smoking, strong language

The full game

• Around four hours of story
• Release: 2027

A little French (click to view)
• Mon dieu – my god
• Ma chérie – my darling
• Ouais – yeah
• Hein? – eh? / right?
• Merde – shit
• Mais non – but no / of course not
• Allons – go on / get going
• Couillons – idiots (vulgar)
Credits (click to view)

Music: "Bent and Broken", "Danse Macabre – Big Hit 2", "Danse Macabre – Busy Strings", "Danse of Questionable Tuning", "Divertissement", "Southern Gothic" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0. Additional music from Pixabay (some tracks modified).

Photographic sources (modified: cropped, halftoned, recoloured): "Carmignano barrels" by Giovanni, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Australian National Maritime Museum, Samuel J. Hood Studio Collection. DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University: "Rauchersalon, Augusta Victoria" (Louis Koch, ca. 1888–1894) and "Carriage" (unknown photographer, 1902).

Sound effects: Pixabay. Made with Ren'Py.

Canary is a passion project, written, drawn and built by one person.

This visual novel is me getting back to making beautiful worlds, then filling them with bastards—wretched, raggedy-ass characters who neither seek nor perhaps deserve tenderness.

Yet, somehow, it creeps up on them anyway.

If you have pearls of wisdom, unsavoury words, or simply wish to drop the word “based” in the comments, I approve of all of it. A rating helps this one-woman show enormously.

Et vous, mes délicieux petits beignets : si mon français laisse à désirer, pardonnez-moi. J’apprends encore. Merci <3

Art updates found on: https://bsky.app/profile/cryptlark.bsky.social