Victoria and the House of Shadows

-This game is a demo/vertical slice, please read the full description for a brief explanation of why we're presenting it this way-

Victoria is a gloomy teenager and aspiring writer in the early 1900s.
She's absorbed by her books and hasn't come out of her room in a long time. But one fateful day, her pet rat Vermin Allan Poe escapes, and she remembers her mother's words "I will squash that ugly pest with my broom next time I see it in my house!,” which prompts Victoria to take action and try to rescue her furry friend.
Things are not that easy tough, because there are forces at play here that she doesn't yet understand...

Victoria and the House of Shadows is a Point & Click Adventure Game through and through. You can  interact with everything, chat with NPCs, take all the objects and combine them in your inventory. If you've played any Adventure Game before, you'll feel right at home here.

Victoria Features:

• Hand-drawn graphics in Edward Gorey's style.
• Squigglevision animation made by hand.
• Professional music score.
• English / Spanish professional localization.

Why are we releasing the demo this way?

Prior to this game, we made Shikon-X, a very experimental adventure game.  We worked on it for over 7 years and almost no publisher wanted to touch it, in the end, after years of negotiations, we managed to get a publisher to release it on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
This publisher didn't really understand Adventure Games, but they liked the graphics and thought they could market it to their existing customer base. In the end, the whole experiment failed and we couldn't make any money out of that game, even tough we're really proud of it.
Most of the proper adventure game publishers told us that Shikon-X was too experimental and "out there" for them,. While they did like the writing and characters, they wanted to see something easier for them to market...

So since we love the genre and want to keep making adventure games, we set out to make a very standard AG, but with our style of writing and special quirks...

After writing the whole game and developing a demo / vertical slice, all the adventure game publishers simply said no or plainly ignored us: no negotiations, no callbacks, nothing.

We invested a lot of time, money and hard work on making this demo, and still have high hopes to eventually make it a full game. 
This is our last attempt to actually make something of it: if we release the demo here, maybe people will notice Victoria and in time that will open the publishers' eyes to this game. Or maybe if we gather a big enough community for it we can do a Kickstarter or Indie GoGo for it. Who knows? But anything is better than just letting the game die.

Why computer voices and all the blah-blah?

If given the proper budget, we intend to make this game fully voiced. At first we made the vertical slice text only, but some publishers wanted to have a better idea of what the final idea of the presentation was like, even using placeholder gibberish.
So we used a generated voice for the narrator and mixed generated blahs and growls for Victoria and the demon.
When we were preparing this WebGL demo, we thought about removing the placeholder voices, but the game felt too empty without them.
We want to hire real voice actors and replace everything, but right now we don't have the budget for it.
TL:DR We hate generated voices and if we get any money to make this game, we'll hire real voice actors to replace that gibberish.

In any case, thank you for playing and we can't wait to hear what you have to say about Victoria and the House of Shadows! : )