Walking Through “Horrors Untold’s” First Pages (Part II)
How we introduce a dismembered hand as a key part of this immersive horror mystery – and make you remove it from the book.
Across the first two pages of Horrors Untold, we’ve established the overarching mystery or challenge of the book (what happened to Haunt Hunter?), the layered narrative (with different people attempting to rewrite – sometimes literally – the contents of nearly every single page), the various puzzles that undergird the whole enterprise, and, as part of those riddles, the fact that you, as the reader, will need to pick up a pen and write in the book. That’s quite a bit to accomplish in such a remarkably short amount of space, and it should demonstrate just how rich of an experience that we wanted this to be (as well as demonstrate just how insane we were to even attempt all this in the first place).
The third and fourth pages keep this convoluted ball rolling by introducing the ritualistically sacrificed Hunter Spivey’s hand, the core gameplay mechanic that will allow you to solve all the riddles that have been slipped into the book by the enigmatic Writer 1. By this point, of course, we have already made clear that dear Hunter’s hand was chopped clean off, but we still hoped that finding it (or, at least, an artistic rendition of it) on the very next page would be something of a surprise – taking a pair of scissors and cutting part of a human limb out of a book in order to bend and fold it in various ways to solve puzzles, after all, is something that doesn’t quite happen over the course of a normal reading day. And, actually, speaking of which, it is this very act – cutting this beautifully designed and produced book – that should really start to send shockwaves through you; just minutes into Horrors Untold, we’re asking you to not only do some pretty unusual things, but ones that also permanently alter your book. This, however, isn’t only for pure shock value – such actions indelibly mark your progress through the whole journey, almost making the book, as one member of our creative team put it, into your personal journal (or, repeating ourselves from last time, it eradicates the physical barrier between you and the story, making it an external extension of your changing internal reality).
(This is a good time to point out that, if you really don’t like the idea of irrevocably slicing up what could almost double as a coffee-table book – a response from several of our testers and early readers, in fact – then you can simply hop over to our website, print out an extra copy of the hand, and use that in its stead.)
The rendering of Mr. Spivey’s hand on these pages is beautifully realized by our incomparable illustrator, Elena Maria Sanchez, who once served as a scareactor herself over at Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood. More than just lovingly bringing this key piece of Horrors Untold to life – a rather major deal in and of itself, given the fact that, up until the very last days before publication, the image that was in place here was just a minimalistic-but-still-functional design that hailed from the puzzle-creation part of the development process – Elena was responsible for crafting the wide variety of art assets that appear throughout all 320 pages. This is far more impressive than it may at first sound: she was solely responsible for designing the logos for our several fictitious haunted houses (my personal favorite is the one for Grendel: Twilight of Humanity, thanks to the sheer amount of thought and historical care that went into it), crafting the stylized depictions of many an iconic HHN element (from blinky cups and merchandise to, well, the icons themselves – or, at least, representative parts of them), and composing that always-challenging artistic item called maps (whether they be of legendary event years or small Ohio towns by the name of Carey). The book, simply put, is brought to vivid life by her efforts, and it was a wonderfully happy accident to have these two early pages, and the rather morbid subject matter they portray, serve as an inadvertent showcase of her abilities – and also serve as a splendid appetizer for the atmospheric feast that awaits.
(Elena relished this opportunity, she once told me, because it’s rare for an illustrator to get the chance to flex all of these different creative muscles [different art styles, logos, maps, etc.] within a single assignment – yet another sign of how complicated, intricate, and unique Horrors Untold truly is.)
The idea behind the hand itself – and, more specifically, using it as the puzzle-solving star of the show – originated from our chief gameplay designer, Mairi Nolan, who thought that it was a far more interesting, dynamic, and visceral solution than the standard “widget” (say, a viewfinder of some sort that would have a window to highlight one word and arrows that would point to others on the page, thereby incorporating them into the solution) that is normally used for other, similar projects. This proposal accomplished several tasks all at once: it was immersive for horror readers and a novelty for puzzle fans; it made Writer 1’s challenges much more ingrained into his and Hunter’s storyline; it was gruesome but not graphic, walking the fine line that all of us on the creative team had laid out for ourselves; and, perhaps most noteworthy of all, it made some of our playtesters a little squeamish, since the human hand is not made to be bent or contorted in the ways that Mairi needed it to in order to reveal the witchy sigils that would then be inscribed upon the diagram of Hunter Spivey’s corpse back on the first page. In other words, this one little suggestion resulted in wins across the board for us and for our little project.
After just four pages, then, readers have been fully buffeted by a crosswinds of immersion, intrigue, and mystery – the perfect recipe for the beginning of a literary-based interactive horror experience.
The real kicker here, though, is that we still haven’t even made it to the table of contents yet…
This is part three of an ongoing series about Horrors Untold, the HHN guidebook/immersive horror mystery. You can read samples and buy your copy here or jump back to the table of contents here.