Most recent release: Eleven Chapter Demo (via cogdemos.ink, as of January 2025). Looks like the site has in-built save slot functionality. You can also use the chapter checkpoints built into stats menu, if you wish.
OR, grab the compiled html version below. As above, this version has per chapter checkpoints, allowing you to return to the start of any chapter with choices and stats intact (access through the stats menu):
Hexfinder-dec25-hotfix-build.html (6.0 MB)
Adding Hexfinder to your Steam Wishlist helps feed and invoke the algorithm demons. Please, please do this, if you have played and enjoyed it so far! Even if you won’t actually buy it on Steam.
It is 1650 in England. Five years have passed since Queen Charlotte I’s Royalists triumphed at the battle of Naseby. The parliamentary figureheads are dead, imprisoned, or scattered to the wind. Yet suspicion and paranoia still grip the nation. Hexfinder General Matthew Hopequins insists that hexcrafters and rebel exiles still plot the queen’s downfall. Others question the queen’s religious sympathies, and see Pontifex plotters around every corner. To the north, on the outskirts of Newcastle, a Royalist army sits in stalemate with Scottish forces.
You will play a hexfinder in the employ of Queen Charlotte’s Anglican Church, tasked with seeking out the witches and warlocks (colloquially known as hexcrafters) who threaten her fair nation. It is June, and the summer solstice approaches. Charlotte announces her intention to return to Oxford, her seat of power during the most turbulent years of the civil war. Assigned to investigate the Oxfordshire villages along the queen’s route of travel, you will begin to uncover signs of heretical treachery at the heart of your sovereign’s court.
Rumors abound that Oliver Cromwell cheated death at Naseby, sustained by diabolical and unholy sorceries…
Features:
- Be a zealous scourge of all heresy, a cynic who’s merely in it for the coin, or take a more charitable view of the accused.
- Pursue fame and prestige in Charlotte’s court through your deeds, and perhaps even catch her eye as a new favorite…
- Uncover treachery within the queen’s own court (this traitor will change in different playthroughs!)
- Or aid a parliamentary plot to bring down your monarch.
- Keep hexcrafting at arm’s length, or risk the suspicion of your peers by embracing the arcane and occult.
- Engage in thoroughly heretical smooching with four or five (depending on how ambitious I get this time!) different romantic partners.
- Name your horse, and (if sufficiently gifted/deluded) maybe even have a good chat with them.
- Wear a big black hat, like, all the time.
That’s all fine, but when can we play some WIP chapters?
Right now, in fact! If you missed it at the top, the first eleven chapters are playable here.
This playable portion will expand as I write new chapters (more updates to come!) Current total word count is around 830k, and a single play-through is 130k or so in length. As you can perhaps surmise from those totals, it is quite branchy. Replaying is encouraged.
I also wrote Mask of the Plague Doctor in 2020, in case you’re enjoying this WiP and thinking “hm, did he do anything else?”
Hark! A second document.
What’s this? A new letter from Primkins?
And definitely loving the background documents!