OBSCURA news & patch notes

Whew, hello my beautiful raccoon friends! We’ve all made it through May, which I would consider a massive success! What a beautiful, bananas month. I’ll be up front and say that this month’s update is very small, on account of everyone being crazy busy. Just for myself, I spent all month doing research, writing my magister thesis, catching a cold, and doing some international travel to attend a wedding. A really cool and fun time! But OBSCURA did get put on the back burner this month for me because of that.

So, what can we share about the merry month of May? Tobi is once again the raccoon of the month, as she was able to get a ton of good work done before the back half of May swallowed her whole with a major personal obligation. Cirrus’ script skeleton is looking extremely good, and while I’m not about to make any definitive predictions it does look like she’ll be entering the fleshy stage of development at a good pace. She’ll definitely be getting there before me!

As for a script preview, this little section gave me a good chuckle. Cirrus at higher affection is very different from lower affection in a way I find very funny.

And now we’re in June, my favourite month of the year, so hopefully I’ll be able to wrangle more time to work on Obscura! Have a glad midsommar, a happy pride, and we’ll be back again to talk next month!

Love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 🦝🩵

Hello, hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! It’s May, the sun is shining, the weather is warming up, and we just got off a wonderful long weekend! It’s been a busy month, though unfortunately not as much for raccoon-y reasons as we’d like. Still, let’s look at the progress we’ve made!

Happenings So, the most important news of the day is that we’re taking part in two events this month! The Otome Games Celebration has started at time of posting, which is a celebration of a major branch of romance VNs with female MCs (or optionally-female MCs, like our Vesper!) and (mostly) male LIs. Immediately after that, to the second, the Storyteller’s Fest kicks off! It highlights great narrative-focused games, and we’re as thrilled as ever to be included. Obscura is going to be on sale for both events on Steam and Itch, so if you were looking for a moment to pick up the game on a discount, you’ve got two weeks to make it happen.

We’re also taking part in a little bundle on Steam with some dev friends! The Magic & Mystery bundle has Obscura, as well as Made Marion, Sigh of the Abyss, The Good People (Na Deoine Maithe), Alaris, and The Demon’s Apple. The fun part about that is that this is one of those bundles where if you own some of the games in it already, Steam just politely ignores them, adds up the prices of the games you don’t have, and slaps on the bundle discount (an extra 10% in this case) on top of that. So, if you’re looking to get a couple of romance VNs in the merry month of May, that might be the way to do it. The bundle will be running all month, and right now the deal is extra juicy since most of the games are on sale 👀

Monthly Progress As for the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes, there’s a lot less that we can talk about. We’re currently working with some amazing freelance creatives on a little side-project, with Mugi directing them between all her work. We’re excited to show off what we’ve been working on, once we get the chance!

I have done a teeny bit of work on Oleander’s skeleton this month, but April has mostly been focused on working on academic stuff, and May is going to be about the same. I’ll be unleashed to write like crazy come June, provided nothing else happens. The other raccoons have given their thumbs up, so I’ll actually be posting about my research (and how you all can help with it!) on our social media a little later this month.

But Tobi’s been the real MVP this month. She’s gotten through a nice chunk of Cirrus’ story skeleton, and has been a total ray of sunshine to boot. Very small peek at the script this time, but I think some people are going to be excited by The Implications! 👀

And that’s it from us this time. April hasn’t quite been a gong show, but it has been very busy, and a lot of that busyness has been behind the scenes or in our personal lives. I’m looking forward to finishing my academic work, we’re all excited about sharing some of the fun stuff we’ve been working on, and we’ll keep trucking along in the meantime!

Love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 🩵🦝

Hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! April is here and it is… cloudy! At least for this social media raccoon. Still, we can safely say that spring is here and it’s lovely. The update for this month is pretty short, for a couple of reasons, but there’s definitely stuff you’re going to want to hear about!

The Raccoon Jamboree In March we got the team to meet up in person and spend some time together! There was some incredible food and generally fun times, plus we did our big post-Chapter Two debrief and some Chapter Three planning. Getting to tell the team my devious plans for Keir and Oleander was a blast, and there are some things we’re planning for Cirrus’ third chapter that got everyone extremely excited. While a lot of the stuff we talked about has to remain behind closed doors for the time being, there is one important thing we can share.

When talking about Chapter Two, Cajsa and Mugi in particular were in agreement that the one-at-a-time release structure for Oleander and Francesco was much easier to manage. Tobi and I already put our effort into one character at a time anyways, so we’ve decided to just formalise that release structure. We also did a survey asking folks what kind of release structure they prefer, and releasing chapters as they come was easily the most popular answer there, too. 

So! While we definitely don’t have anything else to announce right now (god no), hopefully the individual Chapter Three releases will be a tiny bit more frequent and a little more fun, with each lad getting some time in the sun.

Writing duties are shifting Getting Francesco Chapter Two finished was extremely satisfying for the whole team, but it was a more stressful process than we would’ve liked. A lot of that comes down to personal circumstances that we’re going to keep private, but the end result is that we’re reorganising writing responsibilities a bit. Francesco’s third chapter is going to be split up: Tobi is still going to decide the structure of the story and write the skeleton, but I (Violet) am going to take the lead on adding the flesh to those bones when Tobi needs to step back. 

We already did a bit of this in Chapter Two. Hopefully you didn’t notice any changes in the scenes that I wrote and everything felt like a smooth experience. And with this arrangement we can try to get the best of both worlds: you get Tobi’s vision for Francesco, and Tobi doesn’t get stuck in the stress. 

We’re gonna be busy One fun consequence of the meeting was just having everyone lay out their plans for the next couple of months and realising that we’re currently very busy, and expect to be so for the rest of the spring and part of the summer. We’re absolutely still putting work into Obscura and having fun with it, but it only feels fair to warn you all that for the next couple of months we expect to be prioritising other stuff a little more. You’ll still be getting monthly updates from us, of course!

Finished work With all that said, what have we done this month?

Mugi is still on poster duty. Delivery of the test print has been really slow this time, so we’re still waiting on the official okay to put it up. When it’s ready, we’ll shout it from the rooftops!

Yamiochi, our beloved business raccoon, is wrangling a few things at the moment. We can’t talk about either of them yet (sorry for the tease!), but one of them is moving along at a nice pace, and if the other works out then we’ll have some very exciting news to share soon.

Tobi and I have been writing skeletons! Tobi’s getting Cirrus’ chapter started with what I feel like is the best possible opening.

Meanwhile, Oleander’s third chapter skeleton is trucking along, with one of my favourite bits of optional text so far.

And that’s about it for March! We’re all trapped in Busy Times at the moment, but honestly that seems to be a feature of March and April out here (previous March/April update posts elsewhere also talk about busy schedules and needing to change/update release plans). We’ll be back in a month, of course, to catch you up on what’s going on! Looking at the calendar, there are some nice things coming up on the horizon, so until then!

Love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝

It’s been one heck of a February, hasn’t it? Something about it being the shortest month just makes it seem even more action-packed! So let’s talk about what happened this month, my beautiful raccoon friends!

Francesco Chapter Two came out! Did you enjoy your date with Francesco? We hope so! The big headline this month was finishing beta testing and getting Francesco’s second chapter released for Valentine’s Day, as well as getting out a small patch to fix some bugs (oops!) and add a few more things the info broker can talk about with you. There are probably still things that can be tidied up here and there, but unless there’s something game-breaking that comes up in the future, we can assume version 2.5.1 will be the final update we push for a little while as we turn our attention to Chapter Three.

And we wanna say a huge thank you to everyone who has played this new chapter and seen what exactly Franceso’s been keeping to himself. We’ve been so excited to share this part of his story, and even more excited to see how everyone’s been reacting to it. It does the heart good to see people enjoying your work, and it does the heart even better to see all those reaction images and gifs that people have been posting in response to his chapter’s ending 🩵

We made a new friend!

(He’s not the new friend, per se, but am I going to not share the eye-candy?)

So Wraiith303, the solo dev creating Infinite Stars—a choice-dense sci-fi otome/amare—has a tradition of sharing recommendations and cross-promoing other visual novels they love whenever they do a major update, and for their most recent update they reached out to us! Given that previous cross-promo partners have been When Stars Collide and Andromeda 6, we’re extremely touched by this. Infinite Stars is different from Obscura in a few key ways; for one thing, their setting is very Up (spaaaaace) while ours is very Down (caaaaave)!

But jokes aside, the story of Infinite Stars is full of danger and tension, the main cast are all competent professionals doing the best they can in bad situations, whatever that means for them, the amount of choices offered for sculpting the MC’s personality is really impressive (plus picking your pronouns, sexuality, and body type!), and the romance elements I’ve encountered to this point have been very sweet.

The game is free to play, with 18+ content on Patreon, and as part of the release celebration Wraiith303 is offering a month of free Patreon access to you, our lovely raccoons friends. You can claim the Patreon access here, or check out the game here on Steam or over at Itch.io.

We’re taking it easy, but haven’t stopped working So, what else is happening in the raccoon den? Right now, we’re taking things a little easier. The release push process is always satisfying, but it does take a bit out a procyonid, you know? But there’s not no work being done, of course! 

Tobi and I are getting up to mischief plotting the beats of Chapter Three, of course! And Mugi is in the middle of the process of getting the Chapter Two poster of Oleander and Francesco ready to roll right now. It shouldn’t take too long before it’s up for everyone to get their paws on (including me!).

We’re also planning on having a little Raccoon Jamboree and general planning meeting a little later in March, where we’ll draw up a general outline of the Chapter Three schedule (internal deadlines that will almost definitely be revised later down the line) and make some decisions generally regarding production. Most of it’s not going to be interesting to share publicly, but there is actually something we’d like a little input on.

Let’s hear from you! As we turn our focus to Chapter Three development, we want to ask y’all about your hopes for Chapter Three. Not for the content, which we’re already gleefully plotting, but for the release structure. We’ve put together a very small (only three mandatory questions!) survey, asking you what your preference is regarding release. You don’t need to take the survey if you’re not particularly fussed either way, but if you have an opinion this is a great way to share it! We’ll look at the results during our partying and plotting sessions, to see if we can make plans that’ll make everyone happy.

And that’s all from us here in the raccoon den! We’ve got a lot of nice stuff to look forward to this March, and we hope you’ve got plenty of fun things lined up too. And if not, there’s no reason you can start plotting fun things now!

Love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 🩵🦝

• One of the bad endings wasn't coded properly, it is now in the game and unlockable. You may also notice the endings are slightly re-ordered on the Endings page.
• One of the CGs didn't unlock properly in the gallery. It should now unlock as intended.
• Some incorrect dialogue showing up in certain circumstances at the smoke lounge.
• A handful of typos and grammatical errors have been fixed.

Are you ready for a once-in-a-lifetime date with Francesco Sarri? Some of the fun you'll find in this new chapter of the Obscura story:

• 34k words of new story with everyone's favourite sweetheart, Francesco

• 4 new CGs courtesy of our master artist Mugi!

• More chances to explore the fun side of the market

• At least one thrilling escape sequence

• A new achievement for Francesco and Oleander!

Love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 🦝🩵

Hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! After a relatively low-key but productive December, we started 2026 at an absolute sprint. With the script mostly complete, all four of us creatives were blasting through the last major chunk of work we needed to do at a crazy pace (and Yamiochi, the business raccoon, was busy making her own plans 👀). And our beta test for Francesco’s second chapter has just started, so we are so close to getting the new chapter into your hands!

Audio Cajsa’s putting the finishing touches on the audio for Francesco’s second chapter, which includes a bunch of variations on tracks, a new track for a setpiece scene of the chapter, and tons of new ambiances to make the new places you visit in the market feel that bit more tactile. I also wanna add a reminder here that Cajsa’s music for Obscura is available to buy on Steam, as well as Bandcamp! 

Art I need you all to understand that Mugi has gone bananas, in an extremely good way. As well as finishing the promo image, she has gone above and beyond and made four CGs for Francesco’s second chapter, alongside the usual suite of backgrounds and NPC sprites. Not all four of them were finished in January, of course, but that’s still a huge amount of art from our beloved madlass artist.

And let’s take a moment to peek at one of the CGs she’s made. The context for this is so !!!!, I’m going nuts keeping it in.

Writing We did a word count of the script now that it’s in the polish phase and unlikely to change too wildly, and Francesco is rocking up with 34k words for his new chapter! Tobi did a big chunk of the spriting pass (adding all the visuals, basically) in January, and 34k words is a lot of dialogue to add visuals to, trust me. There was also the final bit of actual scripting to do, which went great. I spent my January editing the chapter and doing tiny bits of guest writing, so there’s nothing to report on my side of the den this time.

But how about a script peek to see you off?

And that’s all we have to say for January! It’s been a total blast being able to put a bunch of work and attention into the game this month, and we’re so excited to be in the beta testing phase. Without giving too much away, keep your eyes and ears open for an announcement in the near future about when the update is going out to everyone!

Lots of love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 🩵🦝

Hello, hello my beautiful raccoon friends! 2026 is here!! And while we weren’t able to accomplish everything we set out to do last year, we’re entering this new one full of ambition and optimism!

December is typically a pretty quiet month for us, and this is no exception. Things are absolutely getting done, but we all make an effort to take a break for the end of the year holidays. You may have also picked up on some extremely subtle clues on Tumblr that I, your favourite (and only) social media raccoon, had to do a lot of travelling and a lot of it went at least a little wrong. So there isn’t a huge amount to chat about. But there’s also not nothing, so let’s look!

Music Cajsa has been working hard on getting the music for good ol’ Francesco ready to go! Like all the other characters’ second chapters, Francesco is getting some new music to cover distinct moments in Chapter Two and they are gorgeous. And a little spooky. And sweet. God I love Cajsa’s music. The new arrangement she’s got going of one of the tunes in particular is making me melt, I love it. 

Art Mugi has been working on the big promo image that’ll show off Francesco and Oleander this month. We obviously don’t want to show that while it’s in progress (we don’t like spoiling surprises in this den!). But since we do wanna show something, how about an image concept we decided not to run with?

It would’ve been a fun picture, though maybe a little deceiving? Francesco is way too nice to be doing this!

Writing This December has been a short but productive month for Tobi! After all the slings and arrows 2025 flung her way, she got a ton of writing done. There are very few exposed bones left on the story skeleton, and a whole lot of meat! Which is my (slightly gory, whoops) way of saying that she made fantastic progress this month. There are a few sections that still need work, plus a little bit of guest writing from moi (you’ll probably know it when you see it), and some sprites that need to be implemented, but ahhhh it feels good to have the finish line in sight!

And since we don’t want to leave you with no peeks at the story…

And that’s December in the books! Thanks to everyone for your patience, I had a major case of jetlag and holiday slowness to recover from. We’re getting back into the groove of work now, and we’re looking forward to getting even more done! After all, one of our favourite holidays is starting to appear over the horizon…

Love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 🩵🦝

Hello, hello my beautiful raccoon friends! November has been and gone and I don’t know about you, but it was a gloomy one here in Sweden. But right now the sun is shining (even if it’s gonna be setting by 16.00 🫠) and it’s a very special day for us!

That’s right!! It’s the birthday of everyone’s favourite grump! Don’t mind him, he’s just sharpening his knife. And in the spirit of Keir, let’s get to work!

Happenings When we Rotten Raccoons are wearing our publisher hat we go by the name Kaguya Project, and we’re super excited to announce that we’ve published our first game under that label!! Knight Case Files is a huge labour of love led primarily by a solo developer that’s got so much effort put into it. The art’s ornately retro, there’s partial voice acting for the whole cast, the story and worldbuilding have been constructed with so much love; we’ve been honoured to be able to help bring this game to a wider audience. The game’s fully translated into English and we’ve got a bundle with them on Steam, so if you bought Obscura on Steam you can get the bundle to get a little discount on Knight Case Files, too (it won’t make you buy Obscura again, don’t worry about that!).

Besides that, there is of course Keir’s big day! Mugi’s last set of images were centred around a spicy theme, and the theme this time around is a little more refined, as you might’ve already caught with Cirrus’ birthday image. Keir doesn’t get a throne (that’s not his style), but hopefully the power and refinement concepts are still shining through!

Audio With the ambience pass done, Cajsa has started creating some original music for a major scene in the first part of the route (it’s a CG moment and everything!). I wish I could share the concept playlist she’s got going on or the music clips she’s been working on, but I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait and… see? Listen? What I mean is that Cajsa is still working her magic.

She also shared a clip earlier this month for a track she’d made and was all “just putting this here as a reminder that it would be cool to use” and it scared the living shit out of me. I love Cajsa so much ❤️

Writing Progress Tobi and I have been hard at work in November! Some of the programming needed to be done in a topsy-turvy order, but the end result of that is that about half of visuals have been programmed into Francesco’s second chapter! The next target is to wrap up a few challenging scenes towards the end. If Chapter Two for Fran doesn’t double the word count of Chapter One, it’s gonna get within kissing distance of it. 

Here’s a screenshot that doesn’t reveal too much, I think! Vesper, what are you planning to do to Francesco’s hair???

I’ve also been casting my eye over the script and have been invited to contribute some worldbuildy elements where I can! I’m also starting a list of all the info broker entries that will need to be updated or added. It’s been fun!

Progress on the story skeleton on my side den has been sporadic, but progress has been made! I do love writing skeletons, it’s really fun not taking the story seriously, then overwriting everything while taking it Very Seriously. 

I am leaving the typos in there alone for posterity. When I say my skeletons are garbo, I mean it.

And that’s it for November! December is a bit of a wildcard for us as a team. On the one hand, it’s time to enjoy the holidays! On the other hand, we’re going to be busy taking part in festivities in December. We hope your December is full of good food and pleasant evenings, and we’ll be back in the new year to check in once again.

Love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 🩵🦝

Hello, hello my beautiful raccoon friends! October was gone in an absolute flash, holy moly. I hope your season was spooky and your ween was hallowed as we barrel forward into the gloom of November! I do like the November gloom, but I am sick of the clock changing every winter and suddenly pulling sunset an hour earlier. But let’s talk about some good stuff instead!

Happenings

When we raccoons are wearing our publishing hats we call ourselves the Kaguya Project, and this month we hit a major milestone for the first game we’re working with, Knight Case Files! We hope to share some fun news about that soon, because hot damn we’re excited about this game. We are also selling some merch under the Kaguya Project name, so if you’re interested in merch, here’s a link to that! We’re hoping to update the shop a little to add something more in the near future.

Also, as you may have seen above, today (the day this is being posted) is Cirrus’ birthday! Mugi knocked the birthday image out of the park, as always! Maybe it’s just because he’s so dang tall, but looking up at him feels pretty natural. Unfortunately, I don’t have any other art progress to share in this round-up, but I hope Cirrus’ birthday makes up for it, at least a little.

Audio progress

As for game dev, we hit the first audio milestone, with Cajsa implementing a first pass of ambiances to Francesco’s second chapter. Cajsa’s audio work comes in waves, and while the final wave can’t be completed until the script is fully locked down and ready to roll, the ambiances are already making the game world feel deeper and more immersive.

Writing progress

Tobi has been an absolute champ in October, blasting through huge parts of her story skeleton and getting tons of story done this month.

Just what are these two getting up to?? Tobi has also been adding the visual assets to the chapter and while there’s still some work to do in some sections (including a small bit of guest writing from moi, because I put off implementing visuals until later lol), the visuals are largely in place now. It’s a big step to have handled, which is amazing!

On my side of the raccoon den, progress has been stop-start, but I am starting to get story skeletons written for Oleander. I have a theory that writing good prose and writing compelling choices are two different skills, so the skeleton pass is absolute garbage nonsense text that cannot go into the final product, but that lets me focus all my energy on writing the choices and branching and making them work (hopefully). 

How garbo is the writing? Well, it does spoil the ending of Oleander’s second chapter, but this is how his Chapter 3 skeleton opens:

So, pretty bad, but it’s doing the job it’s meant to do!

And that’s all from us for this month! November looks like an unglamorous month for us, but I’ll take productive and unglamorous over exciting and chaotic this time around! We’ll be back at the start of December for more news about what we’re up to!

Love,

The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝

Hello, hello my beautiful raccoon friends! October is on us already, somehow, and we are enjoying the cooler days and opportunities to get warm and cosy. Sorry the delay on this post, for some reason the Scheduling Gods decided that everything important was going to happen in the first week of October and things were busy for all of us. We’re gonna start today’s round-up a little different from our usual order, since there’s some important news we should share first!

Tobi’s back!

You may remember in last month’s round-up that Tobi needed to take a break from Obscura for a little while in order to handle some personal business that required her time and attention. Well, good news: she’s back in the saddle and eager to get Francesco’s second chapter wrapped and out the door! 

We’re so grateful to everyone who left supportive messages and reminded us that our health comes first when we posted about Tobi’s break. While we’d always love for development to be going faster, it’s because of your support and patience that we’ve been able to keep working on Obscura without it becoming a major source of stress for us. Thank you so much!

Sales and merch

Okay, back to the normal order of things. We are in the final day of the Autumn Sale, which at time of posting is in the final stretch. So if you’re looking to get Obscura, you have until Monday evening (Europe time!) to get it on 20% discount.

If you’re looking to get stickers, the Chapter Two announcement image as a poster, or a t-shirt to show your devotion to Cirrus, we are officially open for business! Cajsa is also officially selling the Obscura OST, check it out here! 

Art progress

Last month Mugi made huge progress on the Francesco CGs, and this month she turned her focus to the backgrounds and NPC silhouettes the game will need. She is batting a thousand, as usual, and this time I actually have something I can share!

Where will this mysterious door lead? Only we can say, and we’re not telling yet…

What’s coming up

September was a busy month for all of us for our own reasons, but with Tobi back on writing duties this month and a lot of the September responsibilities falling to the wayside, we’re hoping for a more fun and productive month. If nothing else, we want to try to do something small and fun for Spooky Season, so hopefully we’ll have something fun to share on our social media accounts soon!

Hallowed be thy ween,

The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝

Hello, hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! There is a lot going on right now, so let’s chat about how August went (it was certainly a month!).

More romance VN parties!

Studio Élan is kindly hosting an event open to all romance-focused visual novels at the end of September, and we’re delighted to say we’ll be participating! As always, we whole-heartedly recommend folks check out these events, because the world of romance VNs is vast and beautiful ❤️

We’ve got merch

If you’re looking to get stickers, the Chapter Two announcement image as a poster, or a t-shirt to show your devotion to Cirrus, we are officially open for business! Cajsa is also officially selling the soundtrack for Obscura, please give it a look here.

Art progress

I can’t share any images this time without spoiling the surprise (and we all know you’re not supposed to spoil the surprise in Obscura ;3), but Mugi has begun work on the CGs for Francesco’s route, and they are gorgeous. She is also hard at work putting together the new backgrounds Francesco is gonna need, since he refuses to sit still and not explore everything in the marketplace.

Writing progress

Here’s where the news becomes mixed, unfortunately. On my side of the raccoon den, August was very, very busy with non-Obscura work. I had a lot of fun with that work, but it was sad to be away from my boys for so long. Things have simmered down a lot now, thank goodness, though I know I’ll be in another Work Vortex come spring. 

On the bright side, I have finished the very first step of pre-production for Chapter Three: the ✨powerpoints✨. To explain as briefly as possible: when drafting the overarching story beats, I write the story in bullet point format, with each slide being a “scene” (as in a chunk of text that all shares the same goal, tone, or setting). Here’s what a slide from Keir’s second chapter looks like (with a mild spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t played it).

If I had to guess, Chapter One would have had ~5 slides to sum things up. Both of my Chapter Twos used 10 slides. Both Chapter Threes have 15 slides, so there’s definitely a lot of shenanigans planned!

On Tobi’s side of the raccoon den, she’s been through a few upheavals that means she needs to put down the pen for a while. She’s okay, but when working on Obscura becomes a point of stress instead of something we enjoy doing, that means it’s time to take a break. We’re so grateful to everyone who follows us for being so supportive, even reminding us to make sure we’re not working too hard. It’s hard to express through the medium of text, but the gratitude we feel for you all is absolutely overwhelming.

Everyone else is continuing their work on Francesco’s second chapter while Tobi rests, and we’re 100% behind her taking that break until she feels ready to start writing again.❤️

And that’s what happened to us in August. I’m looking forward to an extremely normal and boring September for all of us (cross your fingers!!), and also to enjoy all the eyecandy that’s bound to come our way in the Fall in Love Fest 👀Aren’t romance VNs the best? 

Lots of love,

The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝

Hello, hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! I’ve said it for three July round-ups before \, and I’ll say it a fourth time: July is typically the month when Swedes take their summer vacations! But despite us getting chances for rest and relaxation, we’ve also gotten a lot done this month. So let’s go over what’s been happening.

Thank you for 200k downloads!

The wildest thing on our list of happenings was definitely doing the math and realising that between Obscura and its demo, if you add up the downloads on Steam and Itch.io we have hit over 200k downloads! In our first July round-up we were absolutely blown away by getting 7000 downloads, so as you might imagine we’re pretty tickled by this new milestone. Thank you, everyone who has supported us this far. We literally could not have reached 200k downloads without you.

Oleander Chapter Two

You may have possibly heard about this already, but Oleander’s second chapter came out on the 7th of July! We have been thrilled by the positive feedback we’ve gotten from you about how his story has progressed, and Violet is rubbing her little paws together with evil glee over everyone’s reactions to the chapter’s end. Getting this chapter out has been so satisfying, and we’re so happy to hear you all enjoying it, too!

There’s merch now!

Appropriately for the update for our own merchant gadfly, we’ve also opened up our own little merch shop for business! (Don’t worry about the Kaguya Project name, that’s us when we’re wearing our publisher hat.) We’ve kept the number of items there small for now, but we expect to keep adding items and designs as time goes on, hopefully with some input from the folks on our Discord! Right now you can get stickers of the love interests, the gorgeous Chapter Two announcement art featuring Keir and Cirrus on a poster, or a t-shirt or tote bag with a new piece of Cirrus art from Mugi.

OST Updates

Cajsa has gone ahead and updated the Obscura soundtrack to include the music that’s been added to Chapter Two so far! As always, her work has been amazing. I’ve been blasting the tunes for the entirety of this round-up!

She has a full array of links here to the first chapter, but if you’re looking to stream the new tunes on Spotify you can find them here, and the album is also available to purchase on Bandcamp and Steam! We’ve also set up a Steam bundle for the game and album together, in case anyone could use it.

Payment processor hullabaloo

So this was not my favourite thing to happen during my vacation >:| We’ve put out a full statement a week ago about what’s been happening, you can find it on our Discord or Tumblr. The short version is this: payment processors have pressured Steam and Itchio to remove games containing explicit content or else lose the ability to buy and sell games. There has been an immediate and very loud backlash to this, and we encourage folks who disagree with the financial censorship at play to make their voices heard.

Ultimately, we’ve been very lucky, given the dark and mature content at play in Obscura. So far we’ve avoided having our game delisted, shadowbanned, or removed in any capacity, and while we’re keeping our eye on the situation it looks like we’re in the clear for now. Obviously we’ll update you if that changes. Not exactly the note we wanted to exit July on, but we’re hoping this ends the way it should: with payment processors backing off, and mature games remaining on both platforms.

Art Progress

In much more cheerful news! Now that Oleander’s chapter is in the books, we have turned our focus over to getting Francesco’s second chapter ready! For Mugi, that means getting visual assets locked and loaded, and let me just say that she’s really been putting the work in. Here’s a little look at a new asset she’s just added to the game which we are very excited to play with!

Writing

While I certainly didn’t plan for it to work out this way, turns out that pretty soon after Oleander’s second chapter went out I went on vacation! So there is nothing meaningful to report from me. 

That’s alright, though, because Tobi has been plugging away on Francesco’s second chapter and absolutely killing it. Every time she pushes new text I’m always excited to check it out. And since it’s Francesco’s time to shine, here’s a snippet of the script that may give a clue to part of the Chapter Two adventures.

And that’s the end of the news from the raccoon den for this month! It’s been a very active July on a bunch of different axes, and we’re already moving forward into more new and exciting things! We’ll try and keep this momentum going forward and get Francesco’s second chapter closer and closer to release!

Love,

The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝

Thanks to the amazing work of Cajsa Larsson, the composer for OBSCURA, the game's soundtrack is now available to purchase here on Steam! It currently has 30 minutes of original music, arranged for the album format. Cajsa's work on OBSCURA has been invaluable for creating the world of the marketplace, both with immersive ambiances and with mood-setting music. If you've enjoyed her music in the game, we encourage you to show her some love!

Love,

The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝

Are you ready to see what Oleander’s story has to offer?

Alongside 35k of new narrative content, this update has an NPC to talk to who has 10k of background information about the world and characters to share—if you know how to ask for it—and another art update that’s given us a new sprite system for Oleander (with a new look I think some of you will be very happy about) and a bunch of new backgrounds to flesh out the world. There are also some typos erased and bugs fixed. With any luck, this is the end of our achievement bug woes!

We’re so excited and grateful to all of you for being with us as we tell the story of Vesper’s journey. We hope this addition to the story takes you on a wild roller coaster ride.

Oh, and since we’re celebrating Oleander, the merchant gadfly, let’s share some more fun news. Our merch shop is officially open for business! We’re starting with a small collection of things on offer, but we’ll be expanding the merch options as time goes on (we’re not about to let Cirrus be the only love interest on a t-shirt!). We may even source opinions on our Discord, from time to time 👀

With love,

The Rotten Raccoons Team🦝💙

Goddamn it’s been an exciting month! We have been knuckling down on getting Oleander’s second chapter ready for release all month, and it has been extremely fulfilling. It’s July and we’re so excited!! So, let’s talk about what’s happening.

If you’ve already purchased Chapter 2: Oleander’s second chapter will be available to you for free. On Steam the game should update automatically, while on Itchio you can download the fresh build once it’s ready. You’ll be looking for version 2.1.0.

If you haven’t already purchased Chapter 2: We are keeping the game’s price the same for this release. You can buy the game now and get Oleander’s second chapter when it comes out, or wait for the update to buy the game.

So, what have we been doing? A lot. Mugi revised Oleander’s sprites to give him more flexibility and variety in his posing, and she’s gifted us with many beautiful backgrounds. Some of them are even going to find their way into the demo, which will also be getting an update to ensure visual compatibility and continuity moving forward. Cajsa’s musical ventures have also been incredible to hear. Every time she updates the game I get giddy to hear what she’s done.

Appropriately for an update featuring a merchant, we’ve also finally got our merch store ready to go. It’ll be open for business on July 5th, so keep an eye on our socials for that update 👀

And that’s the update from June! It’s a little short here, but hopefully you’ll forgive us when Oleander’s chapter adds 35k words of story content and an additional 10k words of background/lore information via an NPC to the game in a week. We’ll see you soon.

Love, The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝

• Fixed bug where the black mask variant of the Vesper CG doesn't unlock
• Fixed bug where achievements failed to unlock
• Tidied some typos

• Smashed some bugs; if you were having trouble getting certain achievements before, they may be working now.
• Fixed some typos. There's always one that slips through the cracks...