Clover Bottom, for the press

Hunt the Hollow. Take back what it took.

Something is eating the Bluestone valley. Hunt the Hollow through one hand-illustrated gothic world in the mold of Symphony of the Night. Break its massive, possessed creatures piece by piece, take their shapes, and follow the river road down to the black lake.

Something is eating the valley

The Hollow came up out of the black lake and spread down the river road, and where it goes the years come loose. A frontier fort is stuck in the night after a raid. A county seat burns forever. A coal camp freezes in the winter of the explosions. A lakeside amusement park runs its lights over the water and never closes. The valley’s great creatures are full of it now: a three-headed black dog, a hellbender the size of a flatboat, a two-headed eagle rotting in the sky.

She wakes under the great sycamore, weak, with pieces of her missing. She picks up her tomahawks and goes hunting.

Break them. Become them.

Every boss she breaks gives back a piece of her. Every creature she frees gives her its shape. Run as the Black Dog and break walls with three sets of jaws. Take the sky as the Carrion Eagle. Drift through bars as battlefield mist. Swim as the Hellbender, and sink into the ground as the Root.

Massive, and they come apart

The enemies are huge, and they break. Plates fly off, limbs go, and they fight differently without them. Every boss has a tell you can learn, a window you can punish, and a painted super move that takes over the screen.

Towns that lie to you

Four towns, each stuck in its worst year. The people talk a line or two each. Some tell the truth. Some lie. Some grieve. Some are ghosts who don’t know it yet. Sleep at the inn and the night brings out different people.

The Wheel of Lamps

A ghost follows her, teases her, and will not say what she knows. At the end of the road the Wheel of Lamps turns over the black lake, and in the water the whole valley hangs upside down.

Music by Mitch, from his album about the valley.

• One connected, hand-painted valley, and then the whole map again, turned upside down.
• Five creature forms, earned from bosses. Each one opens the map, and each one fights.
• Massive enemies that come apart: armor, limbs and heads break off and change the fight.
• More than twenty bosses, each with readable patterns and a full-screen painted super.
• Tomahawks to throw and call back, then axes, swords, shields and more. Spells with command inputs.
• Four towns, each stuck in a different year, with shops, inns, barter, tasks, and people who lie.
• Levels, gear, drops, and parts you break off monsters to forge with.
• One story, found and never taught. Ignore it and you have an action game. Dig and you find everything.
• An original score by Mitch.
• Full controller support and remapping. Reduce-flashes, screen shake, text size, HUD size, subtitles and blood settings.

Clover Bottom's heroine is invented, but the valley is real, and the game draws on its true history, including the 1783 raid on the Clay farm and the settlers' killings that followed; those deaths are felt, never shown, the Shawnee appear only as people and never as enemies, and every monster comes from settler, miner and carnival folklore. The history is found by exploring, grounded in the record, and where the accounts disagree the game says so, with a pointer in the credits to the Shawnee Tribe, the Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.

Clover Bottom has violence, blood, horror imagery and grief.

It draws on real frontier violence of 1783: a settler family and the Shawnee men who raided their farm, and what the settlers did after. Those deaths are felt, never shown. No death from the valley's later history is shown or named.

Blood can be set to Off, Low or Full. Flashing effects can be reduced. Monsters bleed black ichor, sap, rust and smoke at every setting.