Hollowdark

A literary life simulation. Characters live, love, suffer, choose, die. The game tells their lives the way a novel would.

What it is

Most life simulators are dashboards of actions and stats. Hollowdark inverts that. The player reads prose, makes choices at meaningful moments, and lives inside one character for seven to fifteen hours from birth to death. Then, if they choose, continues as a descendant. Each character produces a memoir at death — generated from the events of that specific life. The world keeps its history. Your first character's memoir sits on a shelf your fifth character's granddaughter can open.

There are no stat screens. No achievement popups. No content warnings. No sensitivity toggles. Everything happens in prose, in a register that borrows from Ernaux, Ishiguro, Munro, Cusk, Saunders — a register that renders rather than narrates, shows rather than tells, accumulates rather than resolves.

Environment

The game runs entirely in the browser. SvelteKit with adapter-static. IndexedDB for persistence. No backend, no accounts, no analytics, no runtime network calls during gameplay. The game is open-source, but not designed for modding. The codebase is a single-player experience, not a platform.

Deployed on Github Pages at hollowdark.shi.foo. The game is free to play, and will remain so.

Not for distribution

This is a personal project. The codebase is open-source by default (See LICENSE), but no release is planned. No "try it now" build. No roadmap.