Devil’s Liminal: When Love Haunts You Back
What if your quiet summer homecoming unraveled into a nightmare of blood bonds and hungry ghosts? DEVIL’S LIMINAL is a Yuri horror visual novel that blends slice-of-life realism with supernatural terror, all crafted by solo developer Renee of Studio Interlude. With a black-and-white art style inspired by old-school gothic aesthetics and a story rooted in Azores folklore, this game explores trauma, connection, and queer romance in ways that feel both intimate and otherworldly.
Play the demo NOW: https://otome.com/games/devils-liminal/
Listen to the full interview here
DEVIL’S LIMINAL Developer Interview
Renee: Hello, I’m Renee. I’m the lead of Studio Interlude. So I started this studio this year.
Previous to this, I’ve been working in the game industry for 11 years. I’ve worked at a couple of AAA studios, but I wanted to move on to focusing on indie development full-time. And I think I mentioned I’m the solo developer on the game. So I’ve been doing all of the writing, the coding, most of the art and then the direction for everything else and then I’ve had some help with some of the background art, the music and the voice acting.
Renee: The short answer would be I wanted to do my own thing.
I mean, it’s definitely been fun and it was my little kid dream job, you know. But I think even at the start when I was in college and starting to apply for work, my whole goal was “one day I’ll have my own studio and I’ll be game director.”
So I think I finally got to a point in my career where I had been in a leadership capacity at these other studios and done a lot of kind of generalist game design and technical design work and some coding. So I finally felt like, “all right, now I’m prepared to strike out on my own.”
Renee: Right now I’m planning on keeping it solo.
Another part of my background is that I studied studio art, so painting and digital art. So I think at heart I am pretty creative and have a pretty clear vision of how I want things to look. I think that works best as a solo developer and commissioning people to help rather than bringing in other very driven creative people and then butting heads, you know?
But there’s also another version of events where let’s say the game does super well and then, you know, we’re just bringing in money and the next project is super ambitious and then it’s like, “it makes the most sense to have the scale of game I would want by having people on full time.” But right now that’s kind of a pipe dream.
Renee: The initial inspiration is when I myself was an 18 year old waiting for college at home, working, all that. During that summer, I was working on a blog and I wanted to do it in the format of a web art project. I never put it online anywhere. I just kind of kept it locally on my computer, but that was something I was working on. And I always kind of dreamed of expanding that into a cohesive story and putting that out there. So here we are, what, 15 years later and I’m finally doing that.
And then some other inspirations were, in the summary for the game, I mentioned that there’s a lot of inspiration from Azores folklore. Part of that comes from the fact that part of my family is from the Azores. So I started digging into that, visited there, got really interested, and I wanted to incorporate some of that in the game. Also because it’s a setting I haven’t really seen in any other stories. I only know of a couple things that take place in the Azores.
And then the other thing is that when I was in university, I took some classes that really inspired me. I took a class on 1800s literature and I took a class on Tibetan Buddhism as a framework for healthcare.
Renee: Sure! Margo spends a couple of years in private school and she was away from her hometown and she graduated. Now she’s back in her hometown waiting for the college school year to start. But now she’s back to her normal life; she lives in this low income neighborhood. She lives in a trailer. Her father passed away. She has a bad relationship with her mother.
So she’s just trying to, you know, keep low, just get through the summer. Then she runs into a mysterious cat and she runs into an old friend that she knew when she was a little, little kid.
And the cat turns out to be another girl. From meeting these people, she finds out that she has a blood bond with them and that is tied to a demonic pact that Margo made at some point in her life. She doesn’t know when or why. So they’re trying to help her resolve this, but then she also starts having these nightmares about a hungry ghost.
And from Clara, she finds out that hungry ghosts can visit the living in the seventh lunar month, and that coincides with September, which is also the start of the college school year. So she has until the end of the summer to resolve the demonic pact, these blood bonds and the hungry ghost.
Renee: With writing Bec and Clara, I wanted them to feel like pretty different routes, but still significant to the bigger plot.
With Bec, she’s upfront, she’s more upbeat, more interested in Margo, more reassuring and supportive. But then with her, the more you get to know her, the more you’re uncovering her secrets and her sort of hidden dark side.
And then with Clara, it’s a bit of the reverse where you get the scary part of Clara up front. But if you stick by her side, she starts to open up. You learn more about her life. And she has a very soft and sweet side to her that I’m excited for people to see. So like I said, both of them are tied to the bigger plot, but it’s different pieces of it.
Renee: Bec is inspired by my wife!
So when I first started really in earnest writing the story was during COVID, a familiar story I’m sure for a lot of people. That was also around when my wife and I first started dating and then just a few months in now we’re living together. But obviously that went well.
So I’m writing this, sharing it with my now wife. Bec was her favorite character. Then more and more, I guess it’s because you want to entertain your biggest fan. I’m adding more things that are based on my wife’s personality and based on stuff we did together. That’s how Bec evolved. And then another big part is that my wife is trans. So then it ended up feeling like a very natural fit that Bec is also trans.
Renee: With Clara, that’s more about trying to stick with Clara and help her open up and help her with what’s going on with her situation. Her route is you start to learn about how she grew up. So there’s a bit of that in the dreams in the demo. You start to find out why she was a cat.
And then after the demo, we start meeting people from Clara’s past. And then I think a fun fact about Clara, in contrast to Bec, is that some of the stuff about Clara’s personality is based on me! So I was thinking about when I was a grumpy teenager and I was really obsessed with the book “The Da Vinci Code”. So I’m like, “I’ll give Clara some of that personality.”
Renee: It was very important. I wanted to capture that feeling because the game goes into some darker themes. So one of them is about domestic violence.
My thing here is I feel like almost every culture, perhaps every culture is, family is very important. There’s an assumption that family always loves you and does what’s in your best interest. So for people who are in a domestic violence situation, it’s hard to tell people what’s going on and hard to be believed that that’s what’s going on and hard for yourself to believe that that’s what’s happening.
And especially as a teenager, often it’s like, “you’re just trying to get attention” or “you’re acting out”, that sort of thing. So I wanted to get the player to understand that headspace. So the dialogue choices are kind of in conflict of standing up for yourself and maybe making an argument worse, versus being passive but it’s for your self preservation.
Or if you’re prioritizing yourself or a family member, but it’s someone who may not have your interests at heart. So it’s a lot of that sort of conflict with societal pressure and kind of understanding your own situation.
Otome.com
Can you share a bit about the process of building that haunting sound design?
Renee: When I was looking for a musician, I really wanted someone who was experienced with alternative music. Like I mentioned earlier, goth is a big influence and then also grunge and shoegaze. The musician I found, Daniel Teles, they used to be in goth bands and I feel like we are on the same wavelength when it comes to music. So they’ve been perfect.
For each character and scene and setting, we talked about what genres would be the influence and then I would make playlists that we would talk about. I could talk a little bit about what each character, the idea for them was.
For Margo, it’s shoegaze and grunge. For Bec, it’s riot girl and pop punk. For Clara, it’s kind of general 90s alternative with some classical and bossa nova.
And then with the ghost, like you mentioned, we were going for that ambient, the noise kind of feel. More atmospheric tracks, and then we made some new tracks! In the demo you hear one of them towards the end but there’s some more that are for scenes that relate to the demon of the demonic pact.
Those tracks I think are pretty special because I wanted to use an instrument from the Azores, probably pronouncing these things wrong, but the viola da terra. That’s an instrument that’s between a lute and a guitar and it’s special because it has some extra chords and it has two hearts.I wanted to have that instrumental sound in the tracks, so we improvised a bit with some sampling and with using a Caipira viola and tuning it to be as similar to the viola da terra as we could get.
Renee: For casting, I worked with Very Berry Studios. They helped a lot! Got the casting call out there, narrowed down the choices, made it a very smooth process.
A bit about each character. So for Bec, wanted to make sure that her voice actor was trans and could capture that she has a very sweet personality, has this sort of cool California girl attitude, and also be able to do some spooky unnerving line delivery.
With Margo and Clara, I wanted to make sure that their voice actors were BIPOC, especially because the story takes place in a border town.With Margo’s voice actor, she had to be able to balance having these shy, and timid moments, but also standing up for herself and having righteous indignation behind her voice. And then with Clara, it needed to be someone who could be intimidating, but also do a very cute and soft voice.
So with all of them I think I really lucked out and found some great people and I’m very happy with the voice acting. As for full voice acting, that’s another one that would be amazing. Definitely a blue sky goal, but for now it’s a bit expensive and time consuming to implement. So no promises there.
Renee: Yeah, it has been, I would say shockingly positive. So I was like, I don’t really have an online presence. Like I think I’m pretty awkward online. So I was pretty surprised that people were so positive and supportive and encouraging. I’m really glad that the story and the characters resonate with people. I definitely was trying to tell a very sincere story and I’m glad that people picked up on that. I guess I, yeah, I’m just really appreciative of it.
Renee: The full game, it’ll for sure be out early next year or end of this year if I’m really cruising through. It’s kind of hard to nail down a specific date since I’m solo developing but now I’m working on it solo full-time so like I said latest early next year.
And then an exciting thing is in the next couple of weeks I’m looking at doing a soft launch of an early access version on itch.io so that way people can follow along from month to month as I’m adding new content to it. That’s also kind of accountability for me but also if people are excited to get in on it early and see some of this progress for themselves.
In general it’s kind of funny because I’ve had the full plot and everything mapped out for a couple of years now and I’ve had the first draft done for a long while, a couple years now. Like I said, only recently I’ve been able to work on this full, full time. So that’s why it’s been taking a while, but the plot is set. We know what’s going to happen. So now it’s just a matter of me getting all the details in, the flavor in, polishing up art, adding more art and character sprites, that sort of thing. And a little more side plot and dates and all the good stuff.
Renee: Yes. For the player character? ⁓ I’m just sticking with Margo. Because I know you mean that there’s ones where you can pick a different sprite or you can pick this or that, but I guess it’s like, with this, ⁓ I guess I just really have Margo in mind and what she’s kind of going through. And at least for this particular story, it’s a little hard for me to imagine who else it would be.
If you enjoyed this sneak peek of DEVIL’S LIMINAL and want to hear the full story straight from the creator, be sure to check out the full episode on our podcast.
Don’t forget to visit the official DEVIL’S LIMINAL website to learn more about the game: https://www.devilsliminal.com
And if you’d like to support the development and show some love, consider supporting the creator’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/studiointerlude
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