Echoes of Chang'an

Echoes of Chang'an is a mystery adventure visual novel set in Tang dynasty China, in the years after the empire's golden age had passed.

Carrying a sealed letter south on your father's orders, you are caught by the rains of Huainan and take shelter for the night at the Yanlai Inn. Before it is over, someone will be dead — and you will be part of it.

A taciturn, down-at-heel Daoist. An old constable who cannot stop boasting. The inn's beautiful proprietress. A middle-aged swordsman with elegant manners and no master. A bloated merchant who reeks of money. A scholar with his eyes on the capital. A little girl singing the same rain-song all night long.

A dozen ordinary travelers, each with a past of their own — and each with a reason for being here tonight.

Observe closely. Choose decisively. Only by uncovering the grudges, debts and bargains that bind these people together will you find the one thread that leads out alive.

The year is 778. Emperor Daizong holds the throne, and the court calls this a restoration — the empire steadied at last after the rebellion that nearly ended it.

The restoration is a surface. Underneath, the center has cracked. The northeastern garrisons answer to their own commanders and hand their commands down from father to son. Taxes go uncollected, mutinies come and go, and the palace guard is hollow — the throne now keeps its generals in check with eunuch-led troops and careful debts. What the empire still runs on is the south: barges on the canal out of the Jiangnan and Huainan, carrying grain north to keep Chang'an standing one more year.

On the frontiers, Tibetan raiders press the west and the Uyghurs sell their loyalty at a price. The old aristocratic houses are thinning out; scholars of no birth climb in through the examinations; Buddhist and Daoist temples flourish side by side.

The great age is over. What remains of the empire moves forward on momentum alone.

From ministers of state to garrison soldiers, from market vendors to the sons of disgraced officials, everyone in this age is adrift on the same current. And it is what each of them chooses that settles, in the end, what becomes of the empire.

A closed-circle mystery, staged in one inn across one night:

• Nearly every character is carrying a story of their own. Dig deep enough into any of them and you may turn up the piece that breaks the whole case open.

• Eight hours decide who lives and who dies. The pacing is tight and the pressure never lets up — your opponent doesn't play dumb, doesn't stall, and doesn't waste words.

• The truth is in how people phrase things. Read the lines closely enough and you can follow a character's thinking and track where they have been — and get ahead of the killing before it reaches you.

A wayside inn in the rain, built as a full 3D model of the place the story happens in, detailed after Tang architectural practice.

Chang'an itself in the manner of *gongbi* painting on silk — fine-lined, pale-washed, and immense.

Costume and ornament designed out of each character's rank and trade, weighing historical immersion against how it reads on screen.

Clue-card art in a woodblock-print style, laying out the case as it comes together in the protagonist's head.

Everything in the game — the historical figures, the clothing, the architecture, the way people speak — was built on wide reading in the primary sources and in surviving material objects. Within what a story still has to do to hold together, we have worked to put the mid-Tang back on screen as it was. The main storyline and its central endings are set against the real historical record. We hope the world holds up around you while you play.