Soulbound: A Ghost Story (WIP) [Updated April 15, 2025]

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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Alright, the name change is official now, I guess.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be possible to change game titles on COG Demos, which meant I had to create an entirely new demo. Since i don’t think it’s normally possible to transfer saves from one demo to another (even with the export/import function, which seems to be more for storing local copies of saves rather than transferring between demo versions), this does mean that some of you are going to have to restart from the beginning…again.

However, one of my testers was able to maneuver a method of transferring saves from the old demo to the new one. It’s a little involved and requires you to do a little basic save manipulation, but I tried it out and it does seem to work:

Instructions
  1. Save somewhere in the new demo.
  2. Press F12, application, local storage. Find your old Spellbound save (scroll down to find the cogdemo_save_3328 entry under the Key header).
  3. Double-click the corresponding data to the right (under the Value header) so it all gets highlighted and copy it to a text editor.
  4. Find the new demo save (under the entry cogdemo_save_4582).
  5. Copy its value to a text editor in a separate file.
  6. Take "choice_title":"Soulbound: A Ghost Story" and replace "choice_title":"Spellbound: A Ghost Story" in your original save file.
  7. Copy everything starting with {"version" (i.e. just after the long string of numbers at the beginning) from your Spellbound save and replace the corresponding part of your new Soulbound save with it.
  8. Take your result and paste it into the local storage for cogdemos_save_4582, replacing the previous save file that you copied before.

If that seems too complicated for you, I or someone else can probably help out more if you want to jump onto the Discord, as well.

…Or, if even that sounds too complicated for you, you can just replay the game again, which I like to think is not the worst fate one can imagine. Even so, I’m really sorry this keeps happening, but I hope this really is the end of external forces resetting everyone’s progress all the time.

Anyway, I’ll keep the old demo up for a while so people can try transferring their saves if they like, but obviously, once the update comes out, it’ll only be uploaded to the new demo.

Speaking of which, the preliminary draft of the update is done, and currently in the testing process, though in addition to that I also have a few backend things I need to work on before it’s ready to go public, and I’m not sure exactly how long those will take me. I expect it’ll go online sometime next week or so, but I don’t have an exact date.

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there’s a problem with ch II part 4 line 1698 as non-existent variable ‘aerring_rip’

I had succeeded in all 3 checks against felix and the game crash on me.

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Ugh, sorry, I added in a quick bandaid fix for a minor continuity error someone reported and figured it was a small enough fix not to warrant Quicktesting again…then misspelled a variable name in the process, thus creating a much larger problem than the one I obviated in the first place.

Thanks for reporting that; it should be fixed now.

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did this story get rewritten?

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Today is the Universal Day of Culture

…At least, according to Wikipedia. My country, the United States, apparently does not celebrate this day, thus making it, in fact, not universal.

I do, however, have peers in Spain, Canada, and Brazil, all countries that supposedly observe the Day of Culture…all of whom reported different, and thus also not universal, experiences with it—ranging from “I’ve never even heard of that” to “I think I heard about it in school” to “it turns up on the news but nobody actually does anything about it”

Clearly, then, this day is not universal in the sense of prolifieration. But perhaps, one might surmise, it is in fact universal in the sense of dealing with universes, and specifically ones not our own.

It is thus upon this day of cosmic magnitude that we celebrate a culture from another universe entirely, that of the elves of Alfheim, whose ways are both Universal and Cultural, and, most importantly, very much oriented toward the Day. If you weren’t already celebrating this event, you now have a reason to (you’re welcome, Canada!), and if you were, now you understand the true significance of a day you may have once thought of as fleeting, rather than universal.

Happy Day of Culture.

Today’s update contains ~39,000 words (bringing the grand total up to ~361,000), which sounds like a lot, but when you consider that it took me around 11 months to finish, it averages out to around 100 words a day. I’m hoping to start pushing out updates more often, though—not at the breakneck pace I did so back in 2020, lest we end up in another burnout hiatus, but more so than I am now. I think I’ve figured out a more stable and sustainable writing workflow, so we’ll see how well it holds up!

In case you’ve forgotten, this update covers Chapter III, Part 2 (…yes, we’re still in Chapter III after all these years), in which the MC and their companions travel to Alfheim, the land of the light elves. This one has a lot of talking—that’s why it’s so long!—and in addition to some quality time with your companions, you’ll be meeting a few new characters, at least one of whom may appear again.

Like I said, I’m hoping to have another update out within the foreseeable future, probablly in a few months, but as always, I make no promises. Hopefully this will be enough to sate you until then!

In other news, in the spirit of the Day of Culture, I decided it was finally time to put aside my age-old grudge against Tumblr—a site I have long seen as a cultural wasteland—and give it a chance to redeem itself. Time, I think, has proven that there are other social media sites that are actually far, far worse, and It’s my understanding that Tumblr is pretty big in the IF community, so it felt like it was time to bury the proverbial hatchet, bite the proverbial bullet, and make proverbial bedfellows. I think the bedfellows are also supposed to be strange, but it didn’t roll off the tongue as well with that in there.

With that said, you can find my blog here, or in the External Links section of the OP.

I’m not sure how active I will be there, but I did spend a lot of time figuring out the CSS commands to make it look nice, so I figure I should at least try to make it all worth it! So if you prefer to follow people on Tumblr rather than the forums, you can do that, and if you have a question, I guess you can ask it, and maybe I’ll answer (no promises).

Oh yeah, and speaking of questions I haven’t answered:

No, just retitled. But CoGDemos doesn’t let you retitle demos, so that required making a whole new demo with the new title.

Everyone should play the update on the new demo, to be clear! The old one is only still up for the sake of people who (re)played the game on that version, and are sick of having to replay it, and want to take a crack at transferring their saves.

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Guess I know what I’m doing today lol

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finally got a chance to read the update, it was great! truly love this one and cannot wait for more!

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I liked how Valerie called us pretty when she got to see our face, then stumbled over the words. Hehe. Also, the wonderful trans moment by the mirror… augh…

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haven’t read the new update yet but this is one of my favourite WIPs i revisit every few weeks, it’s absolute peak🙏

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Arrghhhh, i need to know how to find the secret ro! can anyone giving me a step by step? or is it still not available?

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:up_arrow: heres some info about the secret ro ^-^

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