The Inn's Rules is a first-person horror game about keeping seven rules across seven nights.
All seven nights are spent in the same room.
Because the room stays the same, you can notice the details changing.
So we made the room itself grow older, one night at a time.
The paper of the shoji screens grows rough.
The fibres and stains of the washi paper come through more strongly as the nights advance, and it never goes back.
The screen on a later night is not the same paper as the screen on the first.
In this update's cover image, the small picture is the first night and the large one is the fourth - the same place, shot from the same angle.
The moon moves.
There is a moon outside the screens, and it shifts a little over the course of a single night - as slowly as the turning of the earth.
The shadows of the wooden lattice drift across the room.
Any faster and it would read as a searchlight, so we kept it slow enough that you shouldn't notice it happening.
On some nights it rains.
Rain falls on certain nights. Wet paper stops passing light, so the room goes darker and the moon disappears.
Which nights are rainy is fixed.
If the weather changed every time you retried, it could never help you tell one night from another.
There is one thing we deliberately did not do.
We do not cast human figures or hands onto the screens.
This game has a rule - when a shadow appears, lower your eyes - and shadows are a signal you are meant to act on.
Putting a silhouette on the paper for atmosphere would make that signal untrustworthy.
Only weather, paper and moonlight appear on the shoji.
One more small detail, if you'll allow us.
The shadows that appear on the floor have red eyes.
We measured and set the position of those eyes individually, for each of the eight shadow images.
A hunched shadow, a crawling shadow, a shadow turned side-on pouring something.
Different silhouettes have faces in different places.
Put the eyes at one fixed height for all of them and you get a red band floating above a head, or eyes hanging outside a body.
And to confirm that the position we chose really lands on the face,
we run our test scripts every time and check all of them exhaustively.
The test counts what fraction of the strip through the eyes falls inside the shadow.
Any image below the threshold does not ship.
A dark game is not an excuse for things not being visible.
You cannot be frightened by something you cannot see.
Releasing November 5, 2026, with Japanese, English and Simplified Chinese support.
If you would like to see the rest, we would be truly grateful if you added it to your wishlist!
The inn is waiting for its next guest.