Illustration by Michael DeForge
Hermetic Refrain: Our Gestating Moon || Our Underwater SunNichole Shinn + Noa Segal
Hermetic Refrain: Our Gestating Moon || Our Underwater Sun - Trailer
+In one or two sentences, describe the main themes present in your game.
Hermetic Refrain explores themes of processing grief, haunting as architecture, theatricality, decay, stagnation, artificiality, shifting perspectives, and the way grief never really leaves you.
+What was the inspiration of the game?
What made your team decide to make this game specifically?
We were heavily inspired by RPGs like Final Fantasy X and games with crumbling, corrupted worlds like Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, and Bloodborne, as well as more experimental narrative work like Anthology of the Killer, films like "Slacker" and "the Love Witch," plays like Sarah Ruhl’s "Eurydice" and Annie Baker’s "the Antipodes," and books like "The Canterbury Tales" and "City of Saints and Madmen." We were initially interested in what fantastical heroes like those become when there’s no more quest and nothing else to fight, but then life happened and this became a project about grieving and growing to accept that grief changes you forever. This isn’t a therapy game about fixing yourself after grief touches you, because that’s not how life goes—it’s a game about having to continue to exist with it and seeing what new parts of yourself you can uncover in the process.
+Talk about your teammates! What was everyone's role?
Nichole has handled the visual design, level and environment design, and audio, and Noa has been doing the narrative design, writing, and dialogue systems programming and implementation. We’ve been doing the gameplay and physics programming together!
play this game on itch.io
Bluesky: Noa - @mothmansearlobe.bsky.social,
Nichole - @spacelionz.bsky.social
Instagram: Nichole - @spacelionz