Welcome to a very special broadcast, beloved audience members! Today we’d like to share with you a few secrets behind the development of Tuned In. Buckle up and get ready for the show!
The original idea of Tuned In came from a personal challenge: to design a horror game that broke away from well-worn formulas, such as the classic survival horror style or the first-person perspective, and instead offered an accessible experience with minimal controls but a vast variety of possibilities, following a philosophy that could be compared to the minimalism of great Nintendo games.
The creative spark came from remembering that childhood feeling of having to manually search for channels on old TV sets, turning a little dial to tune into a signal, never knowing what image would show up. That mix of uncertainty and surprise, stumbling from ordinary channels to strange broadcasts, tarot shows, or teleshopping programs, became the mechanical and aesthetic backbone of the game.
From there came the narrative concept of a cursed television whose channels reveal fragments of a story, forcing the player to jump between them, hunting for clues, solving puzzles, and pushing forward through minigames. All of it brought to life through a striking, visceral graphic-novel aesthetic.
While the original pitch laid out the general concept, the controls, and the premise of never straying from the television, we still had to dig deep into the narrative.
One of the biggest changes from the initial idea in which the protagonist was mute and the player themselves acted as an inner voice, was the decision to have players - in the final game - embody several different characters whose stories intertwine throughout the game. We also added minigames with more action, expanding the range of mechanics beyond the original puzzles.
With those foundations, we built a first prototype, and from there kept layering on art style proposals, visual elements, and effects that unfold outside the television screen itself, growing the project's visual identity.
When you play the prologue (you totally should if you haven't yet!), you play as June as she goes back to Blackwood Manor, her stepfather's home. It's her 18th birthday and she's alone. Her brother, Josh, is missing since the incident. Her stepfather, Arthur, is no longer with the living. But, when she steps into her old home, something has changed…
Beyond entertainment, the game hides a deeper reflection for anyone who wants to look for it. While the starting point is inspired by a well-known internet legend about cursed televisions, we wanted to weave in a critique of how people let themselves (ourselves) be shaped by the information that comes through screens.
Every character in the game stays glued to the television, reacting to and letting themselves be guided by what it, or the host figure who lives inside it, tells them. It's a direct metaphor for informational manipulation: how news, politics, and media can shape collective thought.
With Tuned In we wanted to pay tribute to classics like Saw, Scream, and the more recent Backrooms, understood as pure fun, but also as a vehicle for exploring human trauma. If hope is the light that connects people, trauma would be the shadows shared across every culture and era.
The television in the game connects each character to their own shadows, forcing the player to face them, succumb to them, or transform through them. The long-term intention is for each character to represent a different era, a different belief, and a different kind of horror.
That’s it for today, but make sure you stay tuned in for the next broadcast! We will share more stuff with you regarding the development of Tuned In that you will surely find interesting. In the meantime, remember that you can (re)play the prologue, leave a review if you like it, follow us on social media for more content and updates and spread the word about Tuned In!