for PC, ipad and mobile/tabletop
from Brett Clements - creator of the cult hits Nightmare/ATMOSFEAR. A$200M.
10 years on the drawing board.
Rob graves for body parts and loot, to build your own little Frankenstein before Uncle Shrift eats you alive.
Films · Shorts · Carny Island
Uncle Shrift's Supper Club · Episode 1
How you play · V1
A grave-robbing run takes place between sunset and sunrise, while Crookwood is closed.
He who dies with the most toys, wins.
The skill is in the choices, not in the controller.
Funeral raids and access to Crookwood’s facilities are not part of V1. Later releases →
“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” — After Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Read the full article and images →Earlier Dev Logs · gallery →
Carny Island starts as a solo PC game for Steam. iPad and the Mobile/Tabletop party game follow in later releases.
Game 1 is a solo PC game for Steam, with multiplayer added later. Then comes the solo iPad game, followed by Mobile/Tabletop: a party game targeting 4–14 players aged 17+, using mobile phones as playing pieces and video portals. Players take turns and also play between turns.
A decade of hand-drawn comic horror. Tens of thousands of layers of twisted detail, drawn in vector to hold up at any scale.
Over 40 hosts take turns terrorising you. From the creator of The Gatekeeper: first-person confrontation, right in your face.
The game has a conscience. It remembers your deliberate cruelty—and turns the world, even the weather, against you.
Buying and selling body parts is big business. Keep the heart for your monster—or sell it to pay for your survival.
Original lyrics. Songs about the decisions you make. A soundtrack that gets involved instead of staying in the background.
Each contains a past life—and a ghost. You’re not just digging up bodies. You’re disturbing people.
Assemble a Stein from stolen limbs, organs and dodgy electronics. Hit ANIMATE. Find out what you actually bought.
Lose all nine lives and earn your own headstone. Come back, find it—and rob your previous body.
Volunteer for Shrift’s pre-game interview. Give him something about yourself—and something to throw back at you later.
A snapped twig can wake the dogs. A noisy shortcut can set off a chain reaction across the yard.
Some apparitions are Carnies under sheets. Others aren’t. Check your Ghost Meter before you pick a fight.
Collect ecto plasma and watch your skeleton light up. You’re energised—and suddenly much easier to spot.
Wrecking balls, hidden traps and surveillance turn a painted carnival into a working death trap. The scenery isn’t innocent.
In V1, a grave-robbing run takes place between sunset and sunrise, while Crookwood is closed. Scout, dig, steal—and get out before sunrise.
Bodies rot. Coffins crack. Fresh organs lose their value. Leave a promising grave too long and your fortune decomposes.
Frozen PeaShooters. Egg Cannons. Urinators. Scatter, stun and humiliate your way out of trouble—without firing a bullet.
You can stop making noise. You can’t silence a blood trail. An injury changes how the yard hunts you.
Your little Villain mutters, argues and sings in its own language. Learn to listen: the gibberish contains clues.
Why dig when the coffin hasn’t been buried? Funeral raids and access to Crookwood’s facilities come in later releases, not V1.
Your host also runs the defences. Shrift offers advice, floods your grave and unleashes the dogs. Trust him at your peril.
Crookwood is not an isolated graveyard. It is the front counter of an economy, a religion, a media system and a very badly supervised entertainment empire.
He cues theatrical weather and escalates danger at the top of the Chaos ladder. Rope creaks and ground shadows warn the player before his overhead threats arrive.
Shrift is not the game’s conscience. He is its bad influence—and his possession explains his slow slide into fuckedom.
Players can buy tools, weapons and body parts, sell organs, take credit and even pawn lives. Buying a weapon is not a crime; deliberate misuse is where Dogma begins to judge.
Getting ripped and fucked over is the name of the game. Gweedos turns progress into bargaining. It is where the value of the dead becomes cash—and where the player discovers how little of that value belongs to them.
Their escalation is audible and learnable: head-cock, growl, bark, howl, attack. Silence protects the player. Noise feeds shared pack distress and can eventually summon Shrift.
The DogGones provide the original soundtrack for Carny Island. Sound is not feedback added after the action. Sound is the consequence of the action.
Johnny Prime anchors the news. Existing story anchors include the death of Marley The Bobster and heart prices going through the roof.
This is Johnny Prime with POX News. The music world is in mourning tonight following the sudden death of Marley The Bobster. The Bobster was electrocuted in front of a crowd of thousands. Everybody thought the shakin’ was part of the act. He was smokin’.
It is ordinary, busy and socially protected. That protection is also its danger.
Bodies and coffins pass through its ceremonies. Jesus speaks with an Australian accent, and the bodies are timed to explode on the second joint or glass of wine.
Four nine-drawer cadaver coolers hold bodies and organs. Blackouts can turn intake and extraction into torch-lit navigation.
Best-Before organs are the exceptional loot whose value decays. Pandora gateway stones are intended to route players here.
Current high-authority build notes describe the Pizzeria as visible but non-playable. Its value is orientation, tone and the uneasy proximity of dinner to disposal.
The same industrial ovens serve both functions. The contradiction is blunt and ordinary: food commerce and corpse disposal sharing the same hardware.
Time, biological viability, handling risk and market pressure turn bodies into decisions rather than a generic loot table.
The pause is the point. It makes the player appreciate looting the body. The Harvest is not simply the number at the end of a robbery. It is the inventory from which the player builds, trades and survives.
Dogma has one hard breach: deliberate misuse of a tool. No object is sinful and possession is not a crime; the use, damage, excess and proportionality matter.
The dynamite is not evil. The decision is the problem. Dogma is not about being good. It is about restraint when restraint was possible.
JuJu appears as a face that changes only at meaningful thresholds. It communicates temperature, not a running number, and can carry across lives.
JuJu is the conscience of Carny Island. Dogma is the law. JuJu is what happens when it is broken. It is not a score. It is not a morality lesson. It remembers deliberate behaviour and recognises when a player crosses a line.
TheDogGones
The DogGones Top 40. The Hits Keep Comin'.
The DogGones provide the soundtrack for Carny Island.
We use SUNO to design and build the Carny Island soundtrack which will eventually be recorded by real artists who get what we're about. Singers. Bands. Composers. Cinema is sound. If you're a musician who'd like to score Carny, we would love to hear your thoughts...
Musicians: email Brett ↗
I got this feeling...This terrible, terrible feeling TotoWe're not in Kansas anymore....
No shit.
Welcome to Crookwood on Carny islandEverybody is just dyin' to get in hereCrookwood on CarnyEverybody here is running from somethingSomething that they can never hide
Crookwood on CarnyIt's not hell - but you can see it from hereCrookwood on CarnyAin't no lions and tigers and bearsOh me - Oh my
Devils on my shouldersThorns in my shoesHere without you3' nothinIn a skeleton suit
Oh me Oh MyIf you're easily offendedYou're gonna be horrified
Crookwood on CarnyWhere Nothin is sacredNothin' taboo
So fire that joint,Crack that JackRaise hellAnd let's go wake some dead
Carny Island is not a point-and-shoot game. It explores the operating ideas of traditional entertainment genres and fuses them into a single playable performance.
Most games begin with technology and search for an idea. Carny Island began with a worldview, then waited a decade for production to become possible.
The drawings, Bibles, characters, rules and machinery came first. The code arrived later.
The player has nine lives. Every death changes the pressure. The island does not ask whether you can avoid the end; it asks what story you create before it.
Crookwood is timber, chicken wire, painted flats, engineered graves, live weather, moving shadows and a lethal pendulum. Scenery is never just scenery.
One grave. One floor. One beam. One character. Each element is authored, tested, approved and allowed to join the world.
It is a machine that teaches the player how to be afraid, how to read space and when to move.
The pendulum is a three-dimensional danger field. Graves, trenches, paths, flats and headstones exist in relation to that moving volume. The player learns rhythm instead of memorising a corridor.
A robbed grave can become a bunker: the Villain is three feet tall and the trench is four feet deep.
“The carbon side of carbon-meets-silicon: the game inventor who knows what story, performance and cinema are for.”
