In the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, the Lemonade Games team found themselves in a rental home nestled between two vintage stores. With an ex-antiques professional in their midst and years of game-making experience between them, the idea for the studio’s esoteric adventure game started to come together. “We spent the week conceptualising, making art, taking photos, watching movies and prototyping,” says creative director, Ally McLean Hennessey. “It was a really organic way to start shaping a game, and the spirit of that week carries through in how we work together now.”
In Mystiques: Haunted Antiques, described by its creators as “a game about the four worst women you’ve ever met running a failing antique store”, players step into the platform sneakers of a fashionista/business owner, Gem, who’s struggling to manage a failing curio curation business. Taking advantage of some newly earned and vocationally convenient psychic powers, Gem pierces the veil between life and death, seeking out troves of high-quality merchandise. “Players will be going out on jobs to homes of the recently deceased, estate sales and the like, searching for haunted items and using the information they glean from communing with their spirits to find and bring back the most valuable items to sell,” McLean Hennessey says. From string-bound gaming magazines and lava lamps to cursed vases, you’ll inspect and inventory all sorts of arcane bric-a-brac as you progress.
Gem will be joined by a small cast of lovably problematic prima donnas. “The women of Mystiques are partially inspired by the wave of grifters, scam artists and divas of the late 2010s and early 2020s, such as Anna Delvey, Caroline Calloway and Elizabeth Holmes,” Ally notes. “I just can’t help but be drawn towards them, partially because there’s a sick thrill in watching people misbehave but also part of me holds a genuine fondness for them … to exist as someone who can somehow mentally extract themselves from the psychodrama of being alive as a woman today to such an extent that you can commit heinously selfish and indulgent acts, and still consider yourself to have the moral high ground … that sounds very freeing. Maybe they’re on to something.”
Mystiques: Haunted Antiques takes its paranormal cues from tulpamancy, a practice that stems from Tibetan Buddhism and has inspired other weird and eerie media such as David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks. “Tulpamancy now mostly exists as a Subreddit of people who are interested in the line between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘imagined,’ McLean Hennessey says. “There are many people out there who believe they can manifest an entity into existence through belief and will, and we are interested in them just as we are interested in the woman scammers of our current cultural moment. People who can build the reality they want to exist in for themselves. Who are we to tell them what’s real?”
Pairing inspiration from heady Italian horror greats such as Suspiria with self aware girlcore flicks such as Jennifer’s Body, McLean Hennessey is clear that Mystiques: Haunted Antiques is by no means a cosy game in the contemporary sense. “We’re exploring a story of psychic anguish, and these film-makers knew how to do that in a glamorous, stylish and indulgent way that we really love and are inspired by,” they say. This uncanny, refreshing blend of influences extends into the soundtrack – which follows the brief: what if a 1970s detective thriller movie had a hyperpop soundtrack? – and to the game’s fashion, too, informed by playfully outré brands such as Schiaparelli and Moschino.
Lemonade Games is keen to imbue the fantasy setting with plenty of vulnerability and authenticity, pulling from a wellspring of personal experience to create a game that McLean Hennessey views as an expression of the studio’s soul. “If the people we’re making this game for see some element of themselves, their friendships, their experience of the world in this game and can have some relief, some laughs, or some sense of catharsis from playing it … that would mean a lot to us.”
