Spell Candle is a very promising otome visual novel with a soul, built around themes of grief, love, and healing rather than just pretty sprites and romance tropes. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, creator Monika Yosifova and her team at Bottled Monster Inc. are steadily shaping a story-driven experience that puts the player’s emotions at its center. In the Q&A highlight below, Monika talks about how Spell Candle began, the mental-health focus behind its world, the four complex love interests, and the community that has formed around the project.

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The mind behind Spell Candle

Highlights from Spell Candle

Monika:
“Well, this is my very first visual novel, but for a very long time, growing up playing games around PC cafes, I knew that I wanted to make games. And over the last four years, I met the people who are capable of helping me do that in a way that is to a good standard, which is what you guys have seen through playing the Spell Candle demo.”

Monika:
“Spell Candle is a 2D otome visual novel that aims to raise awareness about mental health and the challenges that we face after losing a loved one.

When you navigate through the game, your choices shape your experience, and the in-game system will reflect your decisions, providing insights into grief-related behaviors. It is a romance game, so your journey is actively supported by four romantic love interests, one of which is the culprit and villain of the game.”

Monika:
“I think since we’re all fans of fantasy, you will understand me very well when I say I’m a dungeon master. And when I write a story, I enjoy building a whole world.

The world where Spell Candle takes place appeared to me after I had a smaller mental health episode in high school. And once I was over it in university and I had clarity about it, I thought: maybe we should tell more stories about mental health and spread awareness about it.

I wanted to build a whole world where in different countries and nations people deal with different mental health issues as their main villains or celebrations, or they’re just a main topic in some way, shape or form that I can make video games around.

In this case, the main one that we tackle is grief, and I find that to be both a very individual and a very universal experience at the same time.”

Monika:
“You can assume stuff, but for the most part, let’s say we have three different conversations between day one, two and three from different characters where you can obtain piece of information “A” that directly reflects and connects to quest “one”.

If you miss all three, then you’re probably going to get the bad ending.

So it’s important for you to follow through on the quests that you find to be important and that you believe can truly lead you to solving the crime itself. Because at the very beginning, at the end of day one, you’re going to have roughly maybe ten quests, ten different lines of questioning that you can go down through, and not all of them are going to lead to the villain. Some of them are just going to be dead ends. That’s just what being a detective is like.”

The Characters in Spell Candle

Monika:
“It’s very much the exploration of love and all its forms, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. Because when I write these characters, I try to explore historically and through different cultures what love means.

For Aqua’s version of love and what he represents, we’re going back to ancient times. We’re in Omnis, the oldest city, and my immediate thought was ancient Greece. But in ancient Greece, they didn’t have one word for amor, for love.

Love has always been… I’ve always found personally that we put a lot of pressure on one word. Whereas the Greeks had, I believe, seven or eight different definitions for love. They had family love, sexual love, the love between a parent and a child.

We actually have a webtoon where our first one that we uploaded is about Aqua and the meanings of love. It’s very beautiful. His inspiration was from all of that.

So he is going to make you feel as a player a lot of different ways. But at the same time, if you choose to romance him and if you choose to make him your partner through the grief festival, he’s also going to be the one who is going to be showing you the most different ways of going through grief, because there are so many different versions of love.

He’s a lot of fun to write. I kind of look at him and think: let me just write mythological Aphrodite, flighty, petty, impulsive, a great mom, a horrible mom. She’s everything. And I’m always so inspired when I write him because he can take me to so many places I never expected him to.”

Monika:
“He is supposed to represent faith. Faith is very much that, it can both comfort you and crush you. Faith can be a very positive thing or a very oppressive thing. So I had to design a character that can represent both, whether it’s through wealth that he can oppress you with, because the moment you see everything that he’s capable of simply financially, that is something that is capable of making you feel poor.

Which is a lot of how peasants tended to feel, and medieval churches tended to dominate finances, be some of the largest landowners in the world.

At the same time, if you’re a believer, faith is one of those things where you’re always going to feel accepted, seen, and heard. You’re always going to be able to find community. So we also had to represent that through him.

I truly enjoy writing him because to me, I get to write a buff, awesome, courageous gentleman who isn’t exactly a himbo. Because for a very long time, the best place you could send your second son, if you had more than one, was to get educated for free in a church.

After Aqua, he is the boldest with his language and proclamations because he can afford to be. Faith has had a lot of power over a lot of years.

He does something that he believes is right and correct without really regarding your opinion. It’s more of a case of: when you’re a demigod who has superior sense and hearing and vision, you’re capable of noticing the slightest changes in the environment. Especially when somebody you’ve never met has entered a location.

In specific, he was demanding of the seller because they were denying you a visitor service because of him, which is not something faith should be doing. It’s for everybody.”

Monika:
“He’s our in-character representation of hope. Hope is never loud. Hope is always quiet. Hope is always the thing that dies last hopefully it doesn’t die. Hope is the one thing where even if you don’t search for it, it remains in the back of your mind.

When you aim to write a character that represents something so unique, so gentle, so small like a wisp of energy that you can always find if you really look for it that is what we aim to do with him.

I am very happy that he’s charmed you. He is, interestingly enough, the most popular character in our community.

I wanted a Gomez Addams-esque man, a man who hasn’t had a lot because hope is never a big thing. But if you give him a centimeter, he will go a mile for you. A lot of people tend to feel that he is very attentive, caring, soft-spoken, warm not in a fireplace way, but in a candle way.

He’ll be there when you need him, the way hope is supposed to be.

We actually haven’t spoken about what they represent as monsters. Mortis is a Cu Sith, which we’ve mentioned. Cu Siths tend to be the dogs in Irish mythology which take people who have passed away to the afterlife. But they also tend to be spirits that, if a child is lost in the forest, they’re going to help them out of the forest.

That is what we wanted him to represent as a feeling.

Water is constantly running. It’s constantly moving. It’s never in one place for too long and you can see that in Aqua, and it’s very similar to love. Earth is strong, dependable, stable, the way Terra is.

Whereas death tends to come with hope, with new beginnings very much the Hades and Persephone myth. It’s a cycle. Death and hope tend to go together. It felt right, gentle, soft, and a way to lessen the burden of grief throughout the whole game.”

Monika:
“I’ve always found that death in Asia is more accepted than death in the West. For them, yin and yang, balance, is a natural thing. Life and death are balanced things.

Being able to explore a slightly more level-headed view on grief, the Asian view of grief, is something that I wanted to do through him.

His personality: he’s the first character that I had prepared before we even started working on Spell Candle. I actually didn’t know he was going to be included in the game because I started the world building through the Ares Empire and he was just the character from there.

You get this character in the ruling class who is used to being very secretive, used to being very domineering, used to being very careful with politics, and not very used to being questioned.

You can sense that he is the study of Asian workaholism in a character. ‘I’m here for work. I’m going to do work. Then I’m going to go home and chill. I’m going to do the work for my community.’

He’s a lot of fun to write because he’s a peek into the biggest empire of the Spell Candle world. But he’s also very important for shaping the background of the main character.

This is not your usual boss. Journalists don’t fall under the Lord of Assassins. They have nothing to do with each other, but you’re sent on a political mission with him nonetheless.

He finds your behavior as a main character, your panic attacks, your nerves, interesting and untypical. And he has you as under-figured out as you have him.

It’s a lot of fun to write a character that has to carefully verbally spar with their boss without getting in trouble, while also trying not to feel like they’re going to get murdered.”

Art and Music in Spell Candle

Monika:
“Our artist is an artist who loves Castlevania and Hades, the show and the game, and I love Castlevania and Hades.

We started developing an art bible, and that was very much based around Hades and Castlevania as a mix of style.

We were looking at a visual novel to learn from, and obviously we looked at the most popular ones. The entire team, I was first, but the entire team fell in love with Touch Starved, which someday I will meet those developers and tell them that I love what they’ve done. That is the only game that I have promised myself that I am taking two days off work for, in order to play when it comes out.

So the art style shaped around that: an art bible of Hades + Castlevania + Touch Starved.”

Monika:
“Thank you. Let me preface this by saying that this was Zach’s first time working on a project this big. I don’t mean big financially,I mean big in the amount of time the music has to play.

Building a soundtrack on your own is not a small thing. He took it on the chin and worked really hard. Throughout the whole soundtrack of the first ten songs, you can hear how much he has progressed in his development.

We met the Verya duet , Maria and Ivayla. We fell in love with their voices, Maria’s voice and Ivala’s harp. I’m also a very big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3, so knowing that Maria sang there made me want to work with her even more.

Zach and I wanted to do music with them because they’re going to add so much.

Starting hopefully January, February, March, we’re going to record several songs with them. We need to compose songs specifically for them to bring out their strengths and see which characters they should go toward, which narratives they’ll help with, and work on adding those into the game.

We’ll also be remixing some of the older songs that Zach has improved upon in the last year and a half.”

What’s Next?

Monika:
“It’s been surprisingly easy, to be honest. They’re all amazing people. They all mesh so well together. Their personalities are phenomenal. They’re loyal. They’re hardworking. They’re willing to put in the hours and I could not be more blessed.

I’m a firm believer that if you really, really, really, really want something and you keep working towards it, at some point when you reach the epicenter of change, that door is going to open for you very easily.

I literally got lucky enough to gather my team in just maybe a month. Everything happened very suddenly. I decided I wanted it. I decided I knew who I wanted to work with.

It really happened very fast and I aim to make it my job that their life is very easy. I know exactly what I want. I know exactly how I want it. I’ve planned the next one year until release. Everybody’s schedules are down on paper and they know them so they can plan their workloads around Christmas, around summer holidays. Everything is there.

If something is not as they like, we reschedule. We move stuff around. We know that some weeks everybody’s going to be working on their full-time jobs and they’re going to have way too much to do or they’re going to be traveling, but you have to make up for it in the next two weeks. I don’t baby them.

They are intelligent adults and when they take up responsibility they tend to follow through and it’s making life as a leader very easy.

I tend to be known for being a control freak, but in the sense of wanting things organized and efficient. I get told a lot that I’m pragmatic and a robot and sometimes even heartless, which is why we joke about me being a vampire within the team and the industry.

But I think that my team itself knows that we’re very good at communicating with one another. They know that I love them, and I have absolutely no fear of telling them that I love them and mentioning that publicly. I think they’re incredible people. They’ve grown to be more of a family than just workers.

I very much admire Swen Vincke and Larian and the way he loves and appreciates everybody in his team and I try to learn from that and reflect that with my team. I think they see it.”

Monika:
“Obviously they are your love interests, but they’re also supposed to be your quasi-therapists, your quasi diary boyfriends, the people who are going to be with you when you’re going through a hard time, the people that you can share your worries about your ‘choose your trauma’ option with.

The whole idea of Spell Candle to me was: you’ve lost somebody relatively recently. You know that you are still suffering from it in some way or form. So you want to make yourself a cup of tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, sit in front of your PC, put your headphones on, interact with these characters and just cry it out or understand why you feel the way you feel.

Or even make choices that people within your life, like parents, have made so you can better understand why they made those choices. They are going to be your… not even your guides, more just the people that you get to share with.

Are they going to end up your boyfriend? That’s entirely up to you. I know that I will absolutely guarantee a kiss per character at the very least if you reach max affection based on your choices with them.

No NSFW scenes, but we haven’t strayed from insinuations in the game.”

Monika:
“That largely depends on the business side of things. I have various discussions with different people within the industry, and some are saying that the visual novel and reading mediums as a whole are dying and being replaced with videos and animations.

In some part I would agree with that; in some part I won’t. Visual novels bring me joy. I believe in them. I believe that if you build a community that loves those things and you give them a good product and they feel respected and interested enough in the story that you’re going to tell, they’re going to keep playing your games no matter what genre they are.

With that in mind, we would love to keep making visual novels, but we also have ideas on how to innovate upon the model and make it more universally interesting. For that, I would need a larger budget.

For now, I want us to finish this video game, show that we can make a video game, learn from it. At first, we will keep making visual novels, iterating on the skeleton that we’re currently developing. We’ll make it better, more engaging, more interesting, more unique, and then maybe move into a different genre.

The correct answer would be: we will keep making visual novels. I think forever we’ll keep making visual novels, hopefully.

I’ve specifically spoken with our team and promised them that I will make a full world map of the Spell Candle universe. Each of the countries has a specific mental health issue and a specific subgenre of visual novel. Some of them might be horror. Some of them might be military. There are a lot of different directions we can go.

I would let the team pick what they want to make. I want them to be interested. I want them to be motivated.

Personally, as the writer, narrative designer and leader of the team, I think I will find joy in creating anything they pick.”

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT: Raya

Monika:
“Rayais awesome. We got inspired a lot from the fact that the first elf that you meet in-game when you get off the carriage to check your documents, we personally got inspired very much by the description of seeing an elf for the first time.

There were a lot of people who, based on the other romance love interests, said: so an elf has animalistic features or monstrous features? No, it doesn’t. An elf has the knife ears that are traditional for elves with a mix of the colorings that are unique to the elements which the elven subrace they’re from is based on.

The earthen colors, earthen shades, for her specifically. At first we wanted to make a character based on mercury, like the metal, because the earth isn’t just the beautiful different colors of soil. It’s also all the precious metals, all of the semi-precious gems, all of the gems. You can do a lot with earth.

As we were going through the character creation process with Dusty, the more we developed Raya, the more I felt mercury would be too complex of a personality to put into a character based on what mercury is as a metal. So why not make her silver? We already have gold in a character anyway, in Terra.

I felt that would be a very interesting character to write and develop based on all the symbolism of silver in the past, silver’s relationship with gold, the mere fact that that’s a feminine character who is the second in command to a very dominant yet warm male character.

She felt like the funnest muscle mommy, but also kind of a softie when you catch her at an opportune moment, because silver, while a pure metal, is also malleable at the end of the day. You can do a lot with it.

It was going to be a lot of fun to write furthermore because you would be guaranteed, from the very beginning of playing her as a love interest, that she is not the villain. So you would have suddenly a safety net of a character who you know 100% is trying to solve the mystery with you, which would completely change the way you write the narrative and the perspective of the character.

I was very excited to potentially do that. But we will add a female romance character probably in the second game. Maybe not Raya, but another character.”

Monika:
“Thank you so much, first of all, for having me on this podcast. Thank you to the listeners. I hope that we were entertaining and we gave you a little bit of insight into what happens within Bottled Monster Inc. and behind Spell Candle.

Thank you very much to our community for helping fund Spell Candle, for loving Spell Candle, for constantly interacting with it.

I would say that hopefully your listeners are just as excited as we are to put Spell Candle in their hands.”

As Spell Candle continues its journey from a heartfelt idea to a fully realized visual novel, Monika Yosifova and her team remain grounded in what makes the project special: sincerity, creativity, and a genuine wish to offer players comfort through storytelling. The conversation above reveals a developer who cares deeply about her world, her characters, and the people who will eventually step into them.

With a supportive community behind the successful Kickstarter and a team committed to thoughtful, character-driven design, Spell Candle stands as a reminder that games can be soft, emotional, and meaningful without losing their sense of magic. If what we’ve seen so far is any indication, the final release will be something truly personal, an experience made with intention and heart.

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