First look at Grim Designs

Grim Designs is the studio's next game, in development for PC first: a dungeon builder with two worlds on one screen. Above, a pleasant town goes about its day, its night and its weather. Below, in levels of clay, is the realm of the Master: Sterling Vane, the village chemist and sin-eater the town killed in 1866 and threw down its own well. Something very old was waiting at the bottom and lent him a life, at a price: a soul for every stone they threw. Every ten years he climbs back out, and the whole town knows the story.

You play the Master. He walks his own dungeon, rules from the Crossbeam (the well's oak frame, now his seat) and works through a handful of grotesque gnomes: townspeople he took long ago, shrunk and changed, still in the torn clothes they were taken in, who dig, haul, sleep in their own beds and eat rats. The town fights back: it watches, counts heads, and if it finds him it performs the Rite again. You win a level on Opening Night, when the Gate to the deep opens and the souls you hold are paid through it. Each level is one Return, ten years apart.

What you see on this site is real capture from the current PC build (Nov 1), with the camera and systems the studio is still shaping. The 3D models of Vane, the gnomes, the Crossbeam and the room kit come from AI image-to-3D tools working from AI concept art; Vane's animation is hand-keyed; the levels, systems and the way a night plays out are the studio's own work.

There is no date and no store page yet. Join the Discord or sign up for launch mail and we will tell you when there is something to play.