Lost in the Dark

Twelve years after the sky fell, there is only one light left on the horizon. Mira is about to learn what it costs.

Lost in the Dark is a story-driven visual novel about a nineteen-year-old scavenger, her little brother, and the single lit city in a world of ash. It is a quiet, cold, occasionally tender drama with the pulse of a thriller: infiltration, bargains, and people who lie to the ones they love because they think it will keep them safe.

Count your batteries. Count your steps. Count your family. As long as the count is right, nothing can go wrong.

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The Story

The Fall came as a chain of volcanic eruptions. The ash never settled. "Day" is now four or five grey hours; nights are black and freezing. Light is the only real currency, and the grey fever, a fungus that thrives in damp ash and darkness, blinds before it kills.

Twenty metres beneath the dead city of Arden, in an abandoned metro station, Mira (19) raises her brother alone. Eli (9) has never seen a real star, so he draws hundreds of them in chalk across the platform walls. He has named the lamp. He asks too many questions. He has noticed that his sister coughs like their mother did.

Upstream, the old hydroelectric dam has become Halo: five hundred souls, greenhouses, turbines, armed guards, and the only medicine anyone has seen in years. Its glow is visible from the metro exit. Its slogan is painted on every wall: "Every child is a light."

When Eli vanishes, Mira goes to get him back. What she finds in Halo is not what she expected, and the people she meets on the way each carry a reason not to tell her the whole truth.

The cast

• Mira: pragmatic, sarcastic, stubborn, protective to the point of suffocation. She counts things to stay in control. She calls her brother "Spark" when her guard is down.
• Eli: curious, talkative, generous, and far more perceptive than his sister thinks. Knows the night sky by heart from a single battered book, The Sky for Children.

• Ada: a scavenger and trader, loud and warm, who has known the family for years. "Everything has a price, honey. Even kindness. Especially kindness."

• Cole: a deserter from Halo's guard, wounded and over-polite, who still catches himself reciting the city's liturgy.

• Silas: the Doctor who built Halo. Soft-spoken, sincere, and absolutely certain of his arithmetic.

"You count too. I saw it on your lips. So count with me."

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Features

• A complete branching story in six chapters, around 17,000 words of dialogue and narration, split into two major routes.

• Four distinct endings, each with its own illustration. One ending is reached through a tally of five visible factors built up over the whole game; the others depend on who Mira has become by the end.

• Eighteen choice points and nineteen tracked variables. Almost every choice trades a survival resource (light, batteries) against a relationship (your brother, an ally, the truth). You cannot maximise everything.

• Choices that pay off visibly. When the crucial moment comes, you see on screen exactly which of your earlier decisions helps you and which one you are missing.

• Sixteen achievements, several of them hidden, and a persistent endings gallery with a hint for every ending you have not found yet.

• Nine full-screen illustrations (CGs), eleven hand-tuned backgrounds, twenty-four character expressions, and an original soundtrack of seven tracks.

• Subtly animated characters (breathing, blinking) using OrbitEngine's sprite rig system.

• Save / load, text speed, auto-advance, skip, fullscreen, custom UI theme and fonts.

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Game Info

Genre	Visual novel; intimate post-apocalyptic drama with thriller elements
Playtime (one ending)	About 60 to 90 minutes
Playtime (all four endings)	About 3 to 4 hours (using the skip function for text you have already read)
Language	French (original). Full English translation included. [TODO: confirm how the language is selected in the released build (settings menu / system language) and that the EN build is shipped]
Age rating	16+ (see content warnings below)
Platform	[TODO: Windows / Linux / macOS / web — list the builds actually uploaded]
Controls	[TODO: confirm — mouse and keyboard expected; list the keys for advance, skip, auto, history, menu]
Engine	OrbitEngine

Content warnings

• Terminal illness and progressive loss of sight
• Violence shown directly: fighting, firearms, a shooting
• Death of a child in one route
• Medical exploitation of children (blood draws), conveyed through its effects (pallor, bandages, weakness), never in close-up
• Grief, moral complicity, revenge
• No gore, no sexual content

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Made with OrbitEngine

Lost in the Dark was built from the first line to the last ending with OrbitEngine, a visual novel engine, and it exists first of all as a showcase: a complete, playable game that puts part of the engine's toolset through its paces on a real story rather than a tech demo.

Here is what the engine does in this game:

• Scenes and branching: six chapters, two routes, four endings, labels, jumps and a final choice whose options unlock conditionally.
• Variables and flags: nineteen of them, including an integer score computed at the branch point and a persistent list that survives between playthroughs to drive the endings gallery.
• Characters: six characters, twenty-four expressions, positioning, transitions (dissolve, fade), and rig-based idle animation on the sprites.
• Backgrounds, CGs and lighting: screen tints for blackouts and night scenes, camera shake, and a dust particle system.
• Audio: looping music with fades and one-shot sound effects.
• Achievements: sixteen unlockables with icons, including hidden ones, surfaced in a custom achievements screen.
• Custom UI: themed main menu, pause, save/load, preferences, gallery and replay screens, custom fonts, a splash screen.
• Localisation: every line of the script carries a translation key; the English version lives in a single language file.

If you are curious about the engine itself: OrbitEngine

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AI Disclosure

We want to be plain about this.

• All visual assets in this game were generated with AI: backgrounds, character sprites and their expressions, the full-screen illustrations, and the achievement and UI icons. They were produced with locally run image-generation models (Animagine XL 4.0), then composited, inpainted and cleaned up by hand.
• The music was generated with AI (ACE-Step). The sound effects are synthesised placeholders.

The purpose of this game is to demonstrate part of OrbitEngine's capabilities with a complete, coherent story. The generated assets made that possible for a very small team; they are not presented as hand-painted art.

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Credits

• Engine: OrbitEngine OrbitEngine
• Visual assets: AI-generated (Animagine XL 4.0), composited and edited by UZApocalyps
• Music: AI-generated (ACE-Step)
• Fonts: Alegreya and Cabin Sketch (SIL Open Font License)

Every child is a light. Count carefully.