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10 Years In The Making
For the $13B Cozy Horror Market
From Brett Clements
Creator of Nightmare/ATMOSFEAR A$200M+
It wasn’t built for this pitch
Carny Island is a Video Game, a Mobile Game AND a hybrid social event
The game is the first commercial expression of a multi-layered franchise
I left Australia in 95 for the LA to discover this thing called the Internet, and digital interactivity. That was the beginning of my journey to Carny Island.
When I first started drawing Carny in 2017, I was plugged in to a bottle of chemo starting a journey of a very different kind.
The colour and creatures I discovered through my art was one way I dealt with my very possible departure from this world.
But I am still here. Milt and I have joined forces again. The art is finished. Now we’re building the game. And we're doing things I could only imagine back then.
Carny Island is a video game that will be released on PC, then iPad and ultimately as a Video Board Game, using mobile phones as playing pieces and video portals. A Halloween ‘event’ for up to 12 adults.
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.
One grave-robbing night. Twenty-four minutes. Scout, dig, steal—and get out when daylight strips away your cover.
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? Disrupt the service, steal the casket—and deal with the witnesses.
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.
Shrift is Crookwood's host, antagonist and master of ceremonies: a functioning alcoholic whose mood moves from sober calculation at the New Moon to peak chaos at the Full Moon.
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.
Open the full fileGweedo's is a black-market shopping assault run from a shipping-container elevator: flashing prices, bells, sirens, bad bargains and absolutely no refunds.
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.
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Mongril, Ferret, Scrotum and Bastard are Shrift's dogs and the graveyard's living alarm. They moonlight as the rock band the DogGones, who provide the soundtrack for Carny Island. They are not introduced as a melee threat; they listen, judge and tell the rest of the island where you are.
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.
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POX News reports Carny Island back to itself. It turns deaths, prices, scandals and new threats into an in-world broadcast instead of a detached menu of updates.
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’.
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The Chapel is Crookwood's public ritual node: a Pandora destination, a working part of the death economy and a place where confession can alter JuJu.
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.
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Crookwood County Morgue is a plain government dead-intake building where bodies become inventory and fresh organs enter the necro-economy.
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.
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Muma Maria's Pizzeria is a meat-loving shopfront that doubles as Crookwood's working crematorium.
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.
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Crookwood is not a crime scene. It is an industry: acquire the dead, process the dead, repurpose the dead and profit from the dead.
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.
Open the full fileCarny never stops the player. It remembers them. Its law creates consequence without sermons and punishment without moral finger-wagging.
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.
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The JuJu Index is Carny's moral accounting state. It rises and falls, remembers behaviour and judges patterns rather than isolated incidents.
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.
Open the full fileTheDogGones
The DogGones Top 40. The Hits Keep Comin'.
The DogGones provide the soundtrack for Carny Island.
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.”
Brett Clements has spent more than forty years turning stories into pictures, productions and playable systems. He began as a teenage newspaper journalist, became a filmmaker on Simon Townsend's Wonder World!, built television and tourism campaigns, and co-founded A Couple 'A Cowboys.
Brett's previous games include Oz Quiz, BRIT QUIZ, DARE, The Truth Hurts and Rap Rat. He created The Gatekeeper and brought Baron Samedi, Anne De Chantraine, Elizabeth Bathory and the Soul Rangers to life under Nightmare/ATMOSFEAR before leaving Cowboys.
Mongril Labs is the team building Carny Island. Brett Clements created the world and its artwork; together we are turning that vision into a game, with AI supporting coding, testing and production.
