Backstage: murdered sleep

Backstage: Murdered Sleep is a psychological horror adventure game. It is the long-dreaded sequel to my 2005 rpgmaker horror classic (look, it's a very small niche, okay?) Backstage: A Nightmare In One Act. 

Inspired most by the original luminaries of the Survival Horror genre--Resident Evil and especially Silent Hill--and the pantheon of horror media classics that inspired them, Backstage: Murdered Sleep blends atmospheric exploration and simple puzzle solving with tense real time combat and resource management. It greatly expands the enigmatic mythology of the Backstage universe while introducing new players to that dark version of our world for new players, and extrapolates the consequences and implications of the original game to a frightening new scale. 

THIS GAME IS IN EARLY ACCESS ALPHA TESTING IN ADVANCE OF ITS OFFICIAL RELEASE. IF YOU WANT TO HELP TEST IT, CONTACT ME HERE (or anywhere else, really) OR PLEDGE TO MY PATREONFOR ALPHA ACCESS. YOUR FEEDBACK IS SORELY NEEDED!

~PLOT OVERVIEW~

Anna Molly Grace is an ordinary college student with an extraordinary problem: sleep terrors so intense they make her life a living hell, keeping her trapped in a cycle of self medication and insomnia. When she receives an invitation from the American Sleep Institute's experimental clinic on Santa Cassilda island, she has no reason to suspect the terrors in store from her, or the forces intent upon awakening something terribly real from the darkness of her mysterious dreams.

Marlowe & Chambers are modern-day witch hunters who would easily be mistaken by society for serial killers if the careful tradecraft that keeps their dark work hidden ever falters. Are these Templars madmen, or is their grisly work kidnapping young women and burning them at the stake truly necessary to protect our world from demonic incursion? What will happen when their story finally collides with Anna's? Who will survive and what will be left of them?

~more ancient rpgmaker history~

Backstage: murdered sleep also adapts story and gameplay ideas and characters from the never-quite-completed Backstage II (last demo release circa 2011) and the Backstage 3: Sinfonia proof of concept. It also integrates my take on the Cthulhu Mythos from my incomplete 2006 Lovecraftian horror RPG Eldritch where Marlowe and Chambers were first introduced...an RPG which apparently is hard to find, so PLEASE let me know if you know where I can find a copy of this game, because I made it and I do not have one.

Witness what happens when a solo dev takes almost twenty years to think about, tinker with and re-re-re-re-reimagine the sequel to an rm2k game he made in one month in his freshman year of college!

The oldest version of Backstage: murdered sleep is the murdered sleep Playable Teaser, the build released for Spooktober Jam 2021.