A Tale of Faust

Info

A Tale of Faust was created as an entry for the 2014 Indie Game Maker Contest. It is a NVL-style Visual Novel that provides an alternative retelling of the Faust Myth.

Media

Download

Download of Faust is down for the time being. Some preparations need to be taken care of ahead of another project. I'd also really like to clean a few things up. It will return at some point, though I cannot commit to a time table.

Background

I've long been intrigued by the Faust myth. The basic idea is that a scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and magic for a fixed period. There have been numerous treatments in literature. Goethe's version is perhaps the most famous, followed by Marlowe's. For A Tale of Faust, however, I started with the 16th century chapbook, specifically as presented here, as a writing prompt. I ended up moving Faust south from Germany to Austria, with the requisite denominational change, but I tried to keep the style.

Given this material, religious content is inescapable. As I mention in the game's readme file, I tried to ensure that the game isn't offensive, but it is entirely possible that some readers, religious and non-religious, might be made uncomfortable by the pervasive religious themes. It is probably fair to classify A Tale of Faust in the genre of Christian allegory, but I intend it only as a work of fiction.

The theme of temporary power is one I wanted to explore via gameplay, at least insofar as there is gameplay in a VN. In A Tale of Faust, Faust can gain a great amount of power at the beginning of the game. However, this is a fixed resource. You can obliterate almost all encounters in two moves, but doing so will deplete the resource very quickly. I had actually intended to explore this with a JRPG, and I still might, but this visual novel sort of came about by chance. I had previously written a finite state machine based engine for text adventures. I saw this contest as a good excuse to dust that off and extend it into a visual novel engine.