Occlude is a "Lynchian horror" cardgame for weird solitaire fans and the "terminally curious"
From the makers of King Of The Castle
A few years ago I found an old hardback tome of Solitaire rulesets on a garden wall. It was a bright, unambiguously pleasant day and I remember thinking 'oh, that's the wotsit that inspired those regency thingamajigs'. So I took it home and tried my hand at a few variations, then forgot about the book entirely. After reading about Occlude, I can only wish my discovery had been more ominous, more foreboding. Why couldn't I have found the book in a secret cellar, its hastily painted-over entrance given away by the motion of air through a dream-catcher? Why couldn't it have been thrust upon me by a desperate man with hypnotic tattoos, pushed into my hands with a precautionary mutter to 'Ware The Onyx Triangle?'
This is the ambience cultivated by Occlude, a "single-player cosmic horror card game for the terminally curious", in which Solitaire is the basis for seven rituals involving Tarot cards, which steadily unlock access to an archive of fragmentary lore. Here's a trailer.
I did enjoy my initial experiments with Actual Cardboard Solitaire. I've already forgotten the rules I picked up from that book, but I remember the gentle buzz of unhurried meticulousness, the satisfaction of stacks forming before me, and the sense of fathomless arithmetic at play beneath the table surface. It sounds like Occlude will be a touch more... agitating, partly because it could be an inventory of your character's awful past.
"Have you ever done something you regret?" the Steam page asks. "What if I told you there was a way to fix it? Make it so that something never happened at all; or perhaps, just happened differently. What if I told you it was as simple as a game of solitaire?"
The developers are Tributary Games, creators of political sim King Of The Castle, which Kaan rather liked. Occlude is "smaller and tighter than KOTC, but just as ambitious," the developers add in the announcement post. "It's Solitaire, yes, but much, much more. It's got puzzle mechanics, and a mind-bending narrative that's a puzzle in it's own right. It's a game that is one thing but also another."
I mean, I could say the same thing of my breakfast today - a peanut butter and jam sandwich. But I do respect the desire to take Solitaire and futz around with the workings via hearty injections of, in this case, "Lynchian horror".
There's no release date yet, but Tributary are running some kind of marketing conspiracy game if you want to get an early taste of the setting. Me, I'm off to dig out that Solitaire rulebook in the hopes that there's, for example, a diagram of a strange and frightening constellation inside the dust jacket.