This is a brief outline of The Shattered World, the setting of the dark sim game Nightwell Inn.
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The Premise
In Nightwell Inn, the player is the proprietor of an inn on the brink of an abyss. They must gather resources, make food and drink, and defend the inn against monsters and brigands in this dark, high-difficulty management sim where crops fail, storms tear down buildings, and highwaymen waylay travelers on the road.
While the core mechanics resemble popular sims like Stardew Valley and My Time at Portia, the dark fantasy aesthetic and the challenging game balance draw more from RPGs like Darkest Dungeon. Throw in a robust, high-stakes story and an unusual Central Asia-inspired setting and the result is a powerful and unique gameplay experience.
The Factions
The Shattered World was rent apart by a magical cataclysm many centuries ago. A bottomless chasm now divides the world into two continents and many smaller islands. To the east is a land of majestic mountains, fertile lowlands, and broad rivers. This is the land of the ancient, technologically-advanced Song Empire. To the west lie vast grassy steppes that melt into endless forest. These forests are home to the hardy and reclusive Rus. Between the two float an archipelago of fragments, the rubble from the great explosion. Here dwells the nomadic Khanate.
The cataclysm brought to a boil the long-simmering distrust between the three factions. Each blames the others for causing the explosion, and each–especially the Khanate, whose ancient territory now lies in countless pieces–lays claim to lands surrounding the rift. Their relations range between temporary uneasy truces and outright war.
Despite the risk of conflict, the area is an important trade corridor, and caravans of all three factions can regularly be found crossing the rift. Many attempts have been made to bridge the rift over the centuries, but one war or another has always swept them away.
The Aesthetic
The Shattered World is loosely based on the geopolitics of 12th-century Central Asia. The architecture and clothing of the three factions are inspired by China’s Song Dynasty, Kievan Rus’, and the Golden Horde, respectively.
This is an isometric 2D game with a hand-drawn aesthetic. Menus and UI elements draw influence from the icons, textiles, and jewelry of these cultures. The character and environment art also draws from these artistic traditions, as well as Romanticism, Symbolism, and fairy tale illustrators like Ivan Bilibin.
The Fauna
This high-magic setting does not feature ordinary animals like horses and cats. Instead, it is populated by a wide variety of magical creatures large and small, especially those from Russian and Chinese mythology–qilin (pictured), firebirds, dragon turtles, and more. These are the natural fauna of the Shattered World, and they may be captured, tamed, and ridden.
When the rift opened, it released seething black clouds of dark magic that still pour forth, sometimes blanketing the nearby lands and bringing with them storms, lightning, and floods of fell monsters that devour everything in their path. Worse still, these clouds can corrupt people and animals they envelop, turning them into evil, twisted versions of themselves.
Fighting off these monstrosities–and protecting what parts of nature remain uncorrupted–is one of the player’s most important tasks.
The Magic
The cataclysm saturated the landscape around the rift with magical energy, which now infuses the people and creatures who live near it. The player can choose innate magical traits, such as enhanced speed, preternatural charisma, and danger sense, as well as features like stripes or horns. Magic-infused plants can be used to craft charms, potions, and enhanced structures.
The most powerful magic, however, is found in the incantations of the three factions’ sorcerers–the very incantations that created the rift in the first place.
As the player discovers late in the game, all three factions were responsible for creating the rift. They had each prepared a devastating spell to wipe out the enemy, and when all three were unleashed at the same time, the interacting magical energies caused the cataclysm, laying waste to all the armies and to the earth itself. These magical energies have long laid dormant, but they are once again stirring, threatening to break apart what of the world remains intact.
The cataclysm can be reversed, but only by the same combination of magic that first created it. Only the most powerful sorcerers of each faction know these secrets–and they refuse to work together.