Watcher's Vigil

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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UPDATE: LotaLabs is HERE!

Thank you all for the support on Watcher’s Vigil! This just the beginning. Watcher’s Vigil is officially the flagship project of my new Interactive Fiction studio, LotaLabs.

Lota Labs is built on the vision of pushing Interactive Fiction onto new frontiers. It’s about building worlds where choices are truly alive. We are on track for the official release of Watcher’s Vigil and look forward to sharing our future projects with you.

You can visit the studio website here: LotaLabs

About the Game

You belong to an order of mutated humans called the Watchers, a product of magic and necromancy and sworn protectors of the Realm. You are the most feared Watcher, and for good reason. Tasked with investigating a recent twisted attack on a remote town, you uncover a sinister plot by rogue members within your Order to transform the Realm using forbidden necromancy and strange monsters.

Due to the manner in which you became a Watcher, your mutation has become both a source of power and a curse, testing your limits. At the worst possible timing, when the Realm seems to be falling apart, a dark past that you assumed was long gone and buried comes to light, further complicating things.

Now you must rely on your own judgment, flout rules, and do what you believe is best; otherwise, the greatest Watcher becomes the prey.

Watcher’s Vigil is a text-based fantasy interactive fiction game focused on power, history, and survival.

To Beta Test, go here: COG Beta

I’m still relatively new to this, so I assume I’ll be adding more details to this thread as I continue to understand it better.

Please leave your feedback on the game in this thread, or you can check out my first blog post on the Lota Labs site where I discuss the making of Watcher’s Vigil and the vision for the studio! I look forward to hearing from you all.

Also note that this project currently contains some AI-generated images, which I will slowly replace with hand-drawn ones bit by bit.

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August 2025 Writer Support Thread
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Just finished this on cog overall great game just a few word errors but great story

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I see you got this from the Witcher a little

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Absolutely love the idea and can’t wait to see how it adapts over time! Also good on you for taking the time to replace any used ai “art” with hand drawn ones! All the power to the artists!

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I’ll check the errors and work on them, thank you for playing.

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Not really, though there are a few similarities lol

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Thank you so much. I plan to make it even better and broader with time.

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Haven’t started reading yet, but here’s a typo from the Glossary.

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Ya that’s what I meant not the story line but you know the mutations and things like that

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Will there be romance options available? If so who will they be?

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Had selected nonbinary and attracted to women, saw on the stat screen it had listed as “straight”. Admittedly, beyond like the super technical terms like gynephilic (which always feel fucking gross, honestly), I don’t really know an alternative outside of manually selecting if you’d consider yourself straight/gay in the case of picking nonbinary. Just kinda wanted to draw attention to it since it caused me to recoil since I’m very unquestionably gay (and nonbinary of a sort).

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Great game, I love it. Although there is an error in chapter 1, I choose to tell Eldric about the Yeti, it showed me the part where I told him and also the part where I did not.

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Corrected, thank you for spotting that.

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Yes, there are three romanceable options with flexible genders, depending on your preference. The second is your childhood best friend who escaped being a Watcher—a rather complex character who blames you for their troubled past. The third option is the child of the Queen Regent, a cheerful character who already admires you. I’ll be adding a detailed description of the romance options to this post later.

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Thanks for pointing that out. It makes perfect sense. I’ve updated it so it reflects better, and I added “queer” as an option too, just in case.

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I’ve just fixed the error. Thank you for catching it.

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I read(I think) most of what you’ve written so far, and quite liked it(I’m particularly impressed by how much you’ve written already) However, I see that it’s tagged as historical fiction, for some reason, which doesn’t really seem accurate and may very well cost you some potential readers/playtesters. As someone who, for the most part, steers away from historical fiction IFs, I almost passed over this WIP because of that tag, but decided to check the writeup first, just in case, and I’m glad that I did. There may very well be other potential players/readers who are unenthusiastic about historical WIPs but, unlike me, decided to pass it over without looking at the description. So, both in order to ensure that those potential readers/players don’t pass over your WIP and to ensure that people are going into your WIP with right expectations, I’d strongly advise you to ensure that the historical fiction tag is changed into something more fitting, like fantasy.

Though I generally don like historical IFs(as opposed to historical non-interactive fiction or non-fiction) that much, I wouldn’t say that I outright hate them either(and to be fair, there have been at least a couple of historical COGs that I’ve enjoyed). But the point is, although there certainly are people here who enjoy or even prefer historical IFs here, they are probably a lot fewer than the people who enjoy fantasy IFs. Since this IF seems much more close to what I and, I think, most other people would consider to be fantasy than it is to historical fiction, it both seems more accurate to replace the historical fiction tag with a fantasy tag and also smarter in the sense that it will likely get more people to be willing to check out this WIP, like I did.

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Bruh not everyone hates historical fiction, there are some interesting wips with this tag but I do agree that fantasy tag should be added

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Appreciate you both flagging this! The game is definitely fantasy, not historical fiction. I just picked the wrong tag when posting. I’ve updated it now so it’s clearer for new readers.

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Stat checks needs to be toned down a bit please

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