In the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, the Lemonade Games team found themselves in a rental home nestled between two vintage stores. With an ex-antiques professional in their midst and years of game-making experience between them, the idea for the studio’s esoteric adventure game started to come together. “We spent the week conceptualising, making art, taking photos, watching movies and prototyping,” says creative director, Ally McLean Hennessey. “It was a really organic way to start shaping a game, and the spirit of that week carries through 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 antique store”, players step into the platform sneakers of a fashionista/business owner, Gem, who’s struggling to manage a failing curio curation business. Taking advantage of some newly earned and vocationally convenient psychic powers, Gem pierces the veil between life and death, seeking out troves of high-quality merchandise. “Players will be going out on jobs to homes of the recently deceased, estate sales and the like, searching for haunted items and using the information they glean from communing with their spirits to find and bring back the most valuable items to sell,” McLean Hennessey says. From string-bound gaming magazines and lava lamps to cursed vases, you’ll inspect and inventory all sorts of arcane bric-a-brac as you progress.
