A small, tightly-paced single-player game.
TidalLock is a roughly 12-hour single-player game in the immersive-sim adjacent corner of the genre map — closer to Pathologic than to Skyrim, closer to Hades than to either. The hook: a fixed authored skeleton, a procedurally-generated middle, an authored ending. The middle is where the genre has historically broken; modern generative tooling lets us make it consistently good for the first time.
We're not making a "wide" game. The world is small, the cast is small, the loop is small. The depth is in how legibly the consequences accrue.
Players who finish the games they start.
Our audience is the player who reads end-game spoilers because they care, not because they aren't going to get there. The market is narrow but not small — every year a handful of authored single-player games ship to it and do quite well. We are unambiguously chasing that audience, not the open-world one.
Closed alpha. Tuning the middle.
The game is playable from intro to credits. Alpha keys are out to 412 testers. The opening and ending land — we're rebuilding the middle eight hours of content, where the proc-gen has to do the most work and currently doesn't quite earn its keep.
Public build, summer.
We're targeting Q3 2026 for the public build. We do not have a publisher and are not currently looking for one. Distribution is direct on Steam and GOG; everything else routes through there. If you're a longtime player of the genre and want a key, the alpha list reopens once around launch.