Perennial v0.9
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Perennial is a survival horror game about being chased by the shadow you see out the corner of your eye when you look behind you on a dark night.
-Story-
Every summer when you were a kid you would hike up to Four Lake Park with your parents. Recently you realised you hadn't been there in 12 years. You decided to go camping alone. You set up camp near the Watchtower and Made a fire with 5 logs, then went fishing and caught dinner. You fell asleep exhausted from the hike.
You woke up around 4 am however. You felt an unearthly chill fill your body. Something was at the door of the tent, silently watching you sleep, it's eyes two piercing points of light. A second later it was gone. You don't feel safe, Maybe you can head to the watchtower and get help or at least feel safer.
-Controls-
WASD - Move
Mouse Movement - Look
Left Click - Interact
Hold M or Tab - View Map (If you have one)
F - Flashlight (No effect on gameplay)
Esc - Menu
Click on a firepit with 5 logs in your inventory to light a Campfire
Click on a Campfire to save the game.
You'll be safe at a lit Campfire.
Be extremely vigilant, the monster tends to sneak up with only minimal sound cues and hides... very well
!!!Perennial is designed to be played with headphones.!!!
How The Monster Works
Only read this if you're not having fun not knowing.
The monster turns into a tree, just like any other tree in the map, after you look at it. The more times you spot the monster the longer it takes to change into a tree and the higher it's chance of charging at you and catching you.
Perennial was made by Breogan Hackett over the course of October 2018 for the Haunted PS1 Halloween Jam.
The game is currently version 0.9 which is the second version released. Update 1.0 the final update (probably) will come at a later date with more improvements to the monster, additional story/gameplay content and some secrets!
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Perennial V0.9 update released!May 31, 2019
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Amazing horror game. Super cool creature concept and the story is great! The map felt fantastic as well, there was always something to look at wherever you go. I had a lot of fun with it!
Awesome job !
I made a video on your game if you're interested :)Hello again! I enjoyed this game so much I just had to showcase it in my Halloween special!
This was a joy to play. i loved the autumnal vibe, and the antagonist was quite unique. The map was huge so lots to see and explore. My one complaint, and maybe this was just a weird bug, but the compass you find mixes up east and west. NW is actually NE, et cetera. That caused me some confusion at first, but after a bit I knew to flip it when plotting my course to the next destination. Is the tree creature somehow based off Irish folklore? At any rate, great job!
Ooh that's strange, are you sure you haven't misunderstood how a compas works? The red end of the needle will always point north, so to tell which way west or east is you line up the red point with N on the compas and the directions on the compas face should be correct with west to your left and east to your right.
It is true that when you turn 90 degrees to the right the red arrow will be pointing to the W on the compas but this only indicates that North is 90 degrees to the left of your facing. As the red end of the compas is magnetised to the north pole of the earth this should be how a real compas functions too by my understanding.
The tree creature wasn't based of any IRL folklore, or at eaast not intentionally, I just wanted to make something with a bit of a slenderman and weeping angel inspiration combined with seeing people play prop hunt.
Thank you for playing, I'm glad you had a good time.
OK I just now went back to check and OH. MY. GOD. You're right-- I completely misunderstood how it worked! I'm kind of embarrassed but hopefully the next person who reads this will get a laugh from my dumbass mistake lol
You're not the first person to struggle with the compas, and I'm sure you won't be the last, hopefully it added to the sense of being lost in the woods I was going for :P
The compass in the game is wrong. The needle always points to the north, so if the needle spins then the whole dial must spin with it, and the front of the compass would indicate the correct direction. What you need to do when walking is ignore the dial, "remove" it from your mind, only focus on the needle and mentally create a dial which spins with the needle. Try this in Google maps or Streetview where the needle spins like here but there's no dial.
Here is a video demonstration of a magnetic compass. This is the type of physical compass I'm familliar with reading so it's what I chose chose to emulate for this game. The game shouldn't have the same ux as google maps because google maps is meant to be a convenient method of navigating in real life, whereas this is a horror game about navigating with less than modern tools.
This was pretty brilliant! I am slowly making my way through the ample offer of horror on itch and this definitely stood out to. This could definitely be expanded into a full fledged game but it's pretty darn nifty all on its own.
very cool game, that honestly delivered on the spooks I so desire. great concept for a horror experience.
Terrified me! It was so horrifying but not so much that it was unplayable. Great mechanic, hate the teleportation (though it was cool) and it was really hard to beat!
Also, why'd the shadow mess around with my compass? I need that!
Haha I'm not entirely sure I remember adding a way your compass gets messed with. Glad you enjoyed and glad I was able to terrify you!
Good job =) I very like the style.
As a huge fan of navigation-based horror games, I really enjoyed Perennial! Wrote a full review of it here, but the long and short is that I really appreciated the monster's unique behavior and how the player has to learn its nuances to get better at surviving, especially when it started getting stronger over time. Great work!
Wow thank you so much for this. The article really made my day, thank you so much for taking the time to dig into the game and I'm glad it appealed to you so well. I really liked how you mentioned about the walking backwards thing, I still don't know how else I would discourage it but my general rule nowadays is that if someone doesn't want to engage with a game on its own terms it's their fault if they don't have a good time ':D
Anyway thank you so much for this, it's always nice to be reminded of the high points of some of my older projects.
I spent some time myself trying to think of a solution for people falling into that playstyle, but nothing came to mind. The Watchtower note explicitly warns you the monster gets stronger, so it's not like the game doesn't give an early headsup. Also the game is short and the navigation focus means restarting is pretty painless, you can just beeline through the previous objectives and set your second run up for success. So all in all I came to the same conclusion as you ^_^
Hello, I would ask you if I can stream your game?
of course! I hope you enjoy!
thanks!
The game was pretty good and also pretty hard, the graphics are gorgeous and the way that the monster increases the difficult surprised me quite a lot, because I wasn't expecting this, I was expecting something more like slender, like, just increasing the speed.
I'm kinda late here but I think that's not a problem, right? xD
Cool stuff! I made it to the end, and I absolutely adore this little game!
I'm playing all the games from the halloween game jam and I love this one so much! The graphics are spot on and I like how it makes me actually use a compass to navigate. My only complaint is that it was really unforgiving- I would hear the sound but wouldn't be able to spin around fast enough and kept dying really early in the game.
Congratulations, good game. Probably I'll try finish it. My "Knowing the game". Portuguese - Brazil. Your game is in this playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGNgvpSP-gshu_ablqNozIVYDOnE8cdwT&pbjrelo...
Fun game, I got lost and threw in the towel but solid game!
Loved the game. Fantastic visuals and atmosphere. I did not complete it in my video, but I definitely will be completing it.
I completed the game, it was a fun and scary ride. More difficult then I thought it was going to be.
YouTuber: Fellowplayer
Really enjoyed this game and I was really confused when I first realized how the monster acted but it was so fun and scary! The art art and concept of this game was very cool and I can't wait to replay it.
Where did you find inspiration for this game, and did it take long to build up this world? :D
I don't know if you've heard of Game Development World Championship before (gdwc2019) but it's a competition for indie game developers where they can submit their games and it's free! It's great if you want some more visibility for the game and it only takes a couple of minutes to join :)
I was surprised at how cool this game is. I was so scared at the beginning i hung out in the watchtower for the longest time xD
Only issue i had was with how many keys you need for various things, even a simple bridge.
may i suggest darkening the compass when the flashlight is off? it's very distracting in the dark.
Totally agree this is a good idea, I'll add it to my todo for the update I'm working on. The way I handle the torch in this game is really hacky because I wanted to experiment with an idea I had for it hence this weird issue. Thanks for pointing it out. Hope you enjoyed the game regardless.
This is one of the scariest games I've played! At first I thought, "It'd be scarier if the monster had a louder sound," but then I realized that it's even scarier the way that it is because you can barely tell if it's about to get you! I couldn't do it all in one playthrough, very scary!!!
Finished the game and very glad to have checked it out! This game looks great and it's fun figuring out how to handle the monster. Great atmosphere!