The full game comes to Early Access on 24 November.The free demo ends at apprentice nine, and most of what we have been building lately sits past that line. We would rather you found it yourself, so here are a few glimpses, and not too many names. After darkFrom apprentice ten, the Academy sends you out at night. We have repainted every place you can be sent, one at a time: a village of houses sunk into the hills, a field under a flood as still as glass, a bell tower standing in the water. There are thirty-five of them, and no two are alike. Under the mereIn the demo, Hollowmere stops at its first ceiling. In the full game you let the mere take it. It comes back higher each time, five times over, and the first flood opens what has been hanging under the water all along. The later termThere are fifteen Disciplines, and the demo opens four. Some of the later ones have rooms of their own: a loom kept by two crows, a well that drinks while you fight, two mysterious seats. I wonder what they are for? Told, not explainedThe first time you open some of these places, the Academy tells you about them in a short film. There are nine so far. What you can play nowThe free demo is the first term: the Mirror and its Sources, four Disciplines, the Proving Grounds, and Hollowmere up to its first flood. Everything above comes with the full game, in Early Access from 24 November. If it looks like your kind of thing, a wishlist helps us more than anything else!Thank you for playing, and for reading this far.
The clerk has been keeping a list. The faculty has asked that it be read out before it grows any longer. It begins with a castle. Hollowmere opens in the free demo today. Below it, everything else that has gone into Grimsorrow Academy since the demo's last update on 1 October, and at the end, what waits in the full game beyond the demo's first term. Hollowmere, now in the free demoAt apprentice level 8 the Academy grants you Hollowmere, the drowned lord's ruin on its crag across the black mere. Click a building to open it, and raise it. Tenants are the castle. A steward shares out the hands by one measure: toward the fields for food, toward the sites for timber, stone and nightwine and more scribes at their desks. Every job has a slider of its own under it: move one and the steward stands back, until you give the hands back to him.Contentment grows the castle, up to what the Keep and the Curtain Wall house. Nightwine poured in the Great Hall is the surest comfort.Tidings come as the whole castle grows: a heron in the reeds, fishers on the mere, a hamlet on the shore, and eighteen more, the last when everything stands at level 20. Each that comes adds 0.5% to every XP the Academy grants, 10% with all twenty.One menu at the map's top right holds Tenants, Tidings, the Flood and Hide UI, and three short cards teach the page the first time you open it.Away from the game the castle works at half pace, for eight hours at mos.t The first time you open it, Hollowmere has a short film of its own. The castle you build here comes with you into the full game, along with the rest of your save. The drowned lord kept his keep for three hundred years and his debts for longer. The Academy took both in payment. The Flood and the Sunless Sea, in the full gameNothing rises past the flood's ceiling, level 7 at first. With the Keep at it, let the mere rise: the castle sinks and begins again, and the mere leaves silt for the boughs of the Drowned Oak, which last through every flood. Each f...
By hand: the Obsidian MirrorDrag across the black glass to scratch it bare. Every scratch pours umbra; a lone click barely registers. Some scratches strike a vein and pour far more, and if you scratch the mirror almost clean it bursts, a flood of umbra, before the tarnish creeps back. Umbra is meant to be spent. Your first Source, a Tallow Candle, seeps umbra on its own, and owning it unlocks the next: a Whispering Skull that has not stopped lecturing, an Inkwell of Night that writes complaints, up to a Void Throne that is empty, as far as anyone can prove. Studies and Refinements upgrade the mirror for the rest of the term. The seepage keeps gathering while you rest your hand, and while the game is closed. While you sleep: the DisciplinesScrying, stoking your Sources and working your Disciplines all raise your apprentice level, and new Disciplines open as it climbs. Click an action and it runs on a timer. It keeps running while you are on another page, or away from the game altogether. Each action builds its own Attunement, so the herb you have harvested a hundred times comes faster and richer than the one you just found. Nothing is gathered for its own sake: Gravebotany's herbs and seeds go to potions and to Husbandry's plots, and Murkfishing's catch goes to the Refectory, which cooks it into the food your fights run on. Every Discipline has its professor. Foreman Durgan is mostly stone. Old Wem fishes with his beard. While you sleep: the Night ErrandsAfter curfew your apprentice walks out and does the night's small murders. Pick a zone and the fights resolve on their own, for silver, gear and Marks. Set a food first and buy Reflex Gluttony from the Bursar, and your apprentice eats before dropping, so an errand can run all night. Clear every quarry in a zone ten times and the next one opens. Where the halves meetThe best upgrade for each half lives in the other.Umbra from the mirror raises your apprentice level, and the level opens Disciplines and spells.The Refec...
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