A drowned world remembers you

You drowned. You woke up in the world the sea forgot — and every step you take across it costs you a memory.

You are a Threshold Walker. Once, in a life you can almost-but-not-quite remember, you went under. Something pulled you back into a world that shouldn't exist — a world held together by Saints, populated by echoes that linger after their bodies are gone, lit by skies that aren't quite the right color.

You can move between what's left of this world and what came before. But the crossing costs you. Each time you shift, a piece of who you were drifts a little further out of reach. A face. A song. A name you should know. A Sunday morning you can almost still feel.

Three echoes notice you. Each of them is dying their own slow, quiet death, in their own way. You have a finite number of memories left to spend before there is nothing left of you to give them.

What do you choose to remember?

What this is

A choice-driven visual novel about grief, memory, and what it means to be witnessed by someone you cannot save.

Three character routes. Four endings each. Twelve possible ways your story can land.

The Seven Deadly Sins are the cosmology of this world — Saints embody the sins, and how you choose to engage with them is how you grapple with the same parts of yourself. Crossing between worlds costs you memories, so insight here is something you spend, not something you accumulate. Every line of dialogue is voiced. Every Saint, every romance, every ending has its own music.

It is, in shape, a romance VN. It is, in feeling, a story about being seen.

A note from me — please read this part

I am a full-time worker. I have loved visual novels for as long as I can remember loving anything, and I built this one in the cracks between everything else — early mornings, late nights, weekends I should have been sleeping.

I paid for every tool that made this possible out of my own pocket. I wrote every line of the script myself. And I made this game because I wanted to sit honestly with something I think most of us sit with privately: morality. Specifically, the seven deadly sins — not as villains, but as the parts of ourselves we have to negotiate with every single day.

The three characters you'll meet are pieces of me, written without disguise:

• Iris is the protector. I am a divorced father, and Iris is what that instinct in me reaches for — the part that wants to shield, to make a safer room around someone, even when shielding costs you something.
• Rowan is the charming, easy, lit-from-within version of myself I wish I could be more often. The person who walks into a room and brightens it without effort. I wrote him because I needed somewhere to put that wish.
• Tesla is my love of technology — curiosity for its own sake, the quiet thrill of what if we built something that could see further than we can.

If you spend time with any of them, you are spending time with a part of me I don't usually get to put on a page. That's the gift I'm hoping you'll receive — and the vulnerability I'm asking you to be gentle with.

Building this has been an enormous amount of learning. I am doing all of it by myself — the writing, the scripting, the testing, the audio pipeline, the asset wrangling, the publishing — and almost none of it was something I knew how to do when I started. Every step has been a quiet education, and a lot of it has been hard. This is my passion project in the most literal sense: nothing about it is required of me, and every hour I spend on it is an hour I chose to spend. I am sharing it now because the only thing left for me to learn is how it lands with someone who isn't me.

What you should know before you start

This is a prototype. I am releasing it early on purpose. The script is large, I am one person, and I genuinely need other eyes to tell me what works, what lands, and what doesn't. Your feedback is the most valuable thing this build can produce, and the next version will be built on it.

Honest disclosures, in plain language:

• Chapters 1 and 2 are stable. They've been through the most testing and the most polish. If you only have time for one sitting, this is a complete arc on its own.
• Chapter 3 is currently in live testing. It's the chapter I'm actively iterating on right now, and it almost certainly has rough edges. If something breaks there, I would love to hear about it — that's the chapter that most needs other people's eyes.
• The [W] world-shift key is not working in this build. I know. It's on the list for the next pass.
• Some features are buggy. Nothing should be game-ending, but if you hit a wall, please tell me where.
• The art is placeholder for now. I deeply hope to commission real artists for the next chapters — I just don't have the funding to pay anyone what their work deserves yet, and I won't ask an artist to undersell themselves on my behalf.

If you make it through even one route, to any ending, and you feel something — anger, sadness, love, recognition, irritation, anything — please come tell me about it. I built a small Discord for exactly this:

Join the Discord →

Bug reports, route feedback, "this line landed," "this line didn't," "I have no idea what was going on in scene 4" — all of it is welcome. That's the whole reason this build exists.

Installation notes

This is an unsigned prototype build, which means your operating system will warn you about running it. The game is safe — these warnings appear for any indie build that hasn't paid for Apple's or Microsoft's developer-verification programs, which I can't justify for a free prototype yet.

Easiest path for both platforms: install the free itch.io desktop app and click "Install" on this page. The app handles unzipping and OS quarantine warnings automatically. If you've never used it before, this is the moment.

If you'd rather download the zip directly:

Windows

1. Unzip the download.
2. Double-click ShatteredWorlds.exe.
3. If Windows SmartScreen blocks it, click "More info" → "Run anyway".

macOS

macOS will be more dramatic about this. Here's what will happen and how to handle it:

• Unzip the download. You'll see Shattered Worlds.app.
• When you double-click it, macOS may say "the app is damaged" or "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified." This is expected. The app is not damaged — that's just Apple's wording for "this developer hasn't paid the $99/year verification fee."

Two ways to launch it:

• Easiest: Right-click the .app → click Open → click Open again in the warning dialog.
• If macOS still refuses (common on Sonoma and later): Open the Terminal app and run this command, adjusting the path to wherever you unzipped the game:

  xattr -cr ~/Downloads/Shattered\ Worlds.app
  

  Then double-click the app normally. It will launch.

If any of this trips you up, ping me on Discord and I'll walk you through it personally.

Thank you

For your time. For your patience with the rough edges. For reading this far down a stranger's page on the internet.

I made this for me. The fact that you are considering spending an evening with it means more than I can phrase.

If you want to talk to me — about the game, about the writing, about visual novels in general, or just to say hi — the door is open here:

https://discord.gg/GU7m245sV

I hope something in this drowned world finds you.

— AlanTuring369