Nine lanterns on the porch rail. Eight of them lit.

Your great-aunt ran the Lantern Hollow Inn for fifty-one years. You met her twice, both times at funerals. Now the inn is yours — eleven rooms, a wraparound porch, and a green cloth-bound register that goes back to 1958.

The register has a column for departed. It has been empty since April 4th, 1961.

A cozy-horror mystery, told slowly

LANTERN HOLLOW is a story-first visual novel set in a two-hundred-person Appalachian town that keeps a light on every porch and does not talk about why. Guests arrive after midnight, soaked, polite, and a little confused about the year. The town's mayor sets the terms. The deputy has three missing-persons files with the inn as the last address. The folklorist in room three has been "leaving Friday" for four Fridays.

Nobody is lying to you. That's the problem.

Four people. Four versions of the curse.

Every route uncovers a different explanation for the register — and every one of them is true.

• Wren Calloway, 32 — kept the house for nine years, paid in a room and a line in a ledger every December. Makes bread at midnight because the kitchen is the only room the house doesn't listen in. She knows who's in room one.

• Della Marsh, 41 — county deputy, widow, not superstitious. Just likes being able to see the door. She wants the book to give her three people back, or tell her it can't.

• 

• June Okonkwo-Pratt, 29 — folklore PhD, the only paying guest, recording everyone on cassette. She thinks the register isn't a curse. She thinks it's an account.

• Tobe Renner, 36 — gutters, furnace, and a copper still in the barn. Working off a debt his brother left in room seven. He's tried to leave town four hundred times. He counted.

  

• Choose who to spend your evenings with. Ask the second question. Earn their version of the truth — and, if you're paying enough attention, something more than that.

  

  Choices that close doors

• LANTERN — the one visible stat. Earned by noticing, never by flattering. It gates the moments that matter.

• Routes that remember — first visits, second visits, and a final commitment that closes the other doors. The people you didn't choose still show up. Their lines change.

• Monogamy, written — no harem, no penalty. Kiss one person and the town notices. Commit to one and the story commits with you.

• Six endings with named cards and an on-screen tally, including the one where you keep the book.

• Hidden dread — a stat you never see, that shifts what the ending says without ever changing which ending you get.

• The register itself — 315 names, an unlockable Tips book, and a page that cuts itself while you sleep.

The threshold

At the end of three nights, every guest in the house stands on the stairs and you are handed a pen.

Close the book. Keep it. Or write your own name in the departed column and walk out the front door with somebody's hand in yours.

Your aunt never had the nerve for the third one. She'd like to think you might.

Features

• Hand-painted, painterly art — 41 backgrounds, 74 character sprites, no 3D renders

• An original Appalachian chamber score: fiddle, cello, dulcimer, and one processional

• 5–7 hours per route, ~14 hours for all six endings

• Full controller support and Steam Deck tested — no keyboard required at any point

• Intimate scenes are optional: one toggle at the start, no content locked behind DLC

• 14 achievements, a 14-image gallery, cloud saves

• Over 35 minutes of mature HD video animation

Keep your light lit.