Questions
for the dead.

Carny Island is a 2.5D comic schlock-horror video game set inside a ten-storey haunted house in a fractured amusement park modelled on world-famous Coney Island. Players rob graves for loot and body parts to build a Monster called a 'Stein, which must pass a test drive conducted by the game's host, Uncle Shrift — a mortician and closet cannibal. Following a limited PC and web-based pilot, Clements plans an iPad edition and then a hybrid video game and tabletop Halloween party game in which mobile phones become both playing pieces and video portals. A new edition is planned for every Halloween.

Both — and it also stands alone. Carny Island is designed as a solo video game, a multiplayer video game and a hybrid video/board game. The plan is to release a limited PC and web-based pilot for testing, move to iPad as a pure art and mobile experience, and then release the full tabletop edition, in which phones become playing pieces and video portals.

Carny Island is designed as a big Halloween event game played at a dinner party. The board is a poster roughly the size of a small dining-room table, and adults move their phones around it. Instead of picking up cards, gameplay is delivered through each phone — the same basic idea as using a VHS tape to deliver the Gatekeeper in Nightmare. It also stands alone as a solo-player game.

Gothic geeks with an absurd sense of humour and high IQs. Or adults at dinner parties on their second glass of red. Carny is designed for people who enjoy authored worlds, dark comedy, genuine horror and games whose systems remember what the player has done.

Yes. Carny Island is blood-drenched and intended for adults. It contains gore, grave robbery, dismemberment, exploding corpses, alcohol, black-market body parts, cartoon violence and grotesque humour. It is also designed to give you the chills through a serious atmospheric soundtrack and the devices of horror cinema. Its formal classification will be determined closer to release.

If South Park were a horror series, it would be called Carny — with a dash of MAD Magazine and the crooked storybook logic of Dr. Seuss dragged through a graveyard. Carny Island is schlock horror, gothic comedy and absurdist theatrical terror, expressed through Clements' unmistakably hand-drawn world.

Carny Island can be played alone. The mobile video game is also designed for multiplayer, with players choosing to play as a Villain or a Carny. The later video/board edition is designed for a group of adults around a dining-room table, using their phones as playing pieces and video portals. The final maximum player count has not yet been locked.

That depends on how quietly you die — and how fast you die nine times. A Villain must find and rob at least three of Crookwood's nine fresh graves, hidden among 60 or 70 graves across a 2,500-square-metre cemetery. The Morgue, Chapel, Funeral Parlour and several mausoleums — including the one occupied by Vinnie the Pig — add further ground to explore. Crookwood is continually being destroyed, the damage is permanent, and shadows and night play havoc with navigation. A successful run is currently expected to take approximately 45–60 minutes, subject to pilot testing.

No. Carny Island is designed as a standalone solo-player game, a multiplayer game and a hybrid video/board game. The board and phones belong to the full tabletop edition, but they are not required to play Carny in its other forms. Clements began designing and playing Carny in 2016. It is not a puzzle game or a shoot-'em-up. It is a horror sitcom in a game.

No retail box or final contents have been approved. Game 1 is currently an iPad-first production build, so anyone listing pieces, packaging or graveyard furniture is attempting to sell you a coffin before the measurements are taken.

Both. Is death funny? Depends on how you die. Carny Island is blood-drenched, absurd and genuinely unsettling. It uses a serious atmospheric soundtrack, shadows, darkness and familiar horror-movie devices to give players the chills, then turns death, dismemberment and disaster into physical comedy. The horror creates the tension. The way you die provides the punchline.

If this were a conventional board game, you would rob graves using cards and your imagination. But Carny is a video game, and the video leaves nothing to the imagination. The board becomes a physical world while each player's phone becomes a playing piece and portal into it. The grave opens. The corpse rots. The wrecking ball swings. The consequences are visible. And can you launch a pig strapped to a jet engine at your wife in any other party game?

Totally. Clements has played it on his own — and in his own head — for the ten years it took to dream up. Carny Island is designed to work as a complete solo-player game. The multiplayer and video/board editions expand the experience, but you will not need a dinner party — or any friends — to enter Crookwood.

First, observe. Crookwood's paths are littered with surprises, hazards and noise bombs, so stealth is more valuable than ripping and tearing through the yard. Choose which fresh grave to rob, then take its loot and body parts. Trade lesser parts for weapons and defences, but keep the best pieces to build a mutated Monster capable of surviving Uncle Shrift's test drive. Choose carefully: parts may be infected, and they do not travel cleanly. As the Monster grows, its stolen parts leak blood. The trail excites Crookwood's inhabitants and gives them something to follow. Tool choice also teaches Carny what kind of Villain you are: the same tool used differently reveals a different intent. DOGMA judges the misuse; JuJu makes the moral consequence visible and remembers the pattern across your lives. Meanwhile, Shrift, Crookwood's inhabitants, permanent damage and the player's own choices collide to develop subplots: storylines emerging from the chaos rather than waiting on a fixed path. All the while, manage sugar, noise, Shrift's unpredictability and a world that permanently remembers its damage, disturbed graves and your decisions.

In the standalone and multiplayer video game, there are no turns: Crookwood's dangers remain live. In the video/board game, players roll a digital die and move across the board's grid in any direction. Stop at a grave, enter its keycode and the grave opens for robbery on your device. That also reveals your Crookwood coordinates, allowing other players to enter them and attack you at any time. Movement may take a turn. Carny does not. The carnage never ends. It is party time.

A grave is a touch-reveal-reward-consequence machine. The player peels through grass, topsoil, gravel, coffin, body, valuables and anomalies; tool choice, energy, noise, substrate and intent change the cost and consequences of the excavation. Every body buried in Crookwood has a story. Nine of those stories play out through animated flashbacks as their graves are robbed, turning the dead into episodes within the larger game. Then there are the ghosts. The grave is therefore not just a container of loot: it is a source of biography, memory, danger and further story.

To build a basic 'Stein, a player must collect 17 limbs and bone parts, six vital organs and a set of eyes. That is only the beginning. The 'Stein can be improved with robotics, artificial parts and armoured prosthetics, and a player can eventually build an entire squad of them. After playing once or twice, players discover that their 'Steins must keep evolving rather than remain a single finished build.

Donuts give the Villain the energy needed to navigate Crookwood and rob graves. They are measured by energy, not grams of carbohydrate: a plain donut supplies 600 kJ, an iced donut 1,100 kJ and a jam or candy donut 1,600 kJ. The current game figure for excavating a dry grave is roughly six or seven iced donuts — about 7,700 kJ. A canonical grave is 4 feet wide, 7 feet long and 6 feet deep, with the coffin lid 4 feet below ground, so the Villain must remove roughly 4 feet of substrate before the robbery truly begins. Low energy slows the Villain; zero energy means instant death. Final per-action tuning remains subject to playtesting.

The objective of a run is to collect as many body parts as possible and make as much GITCOIN as you can. Every stolen body part is measured in GITCOIN, turning anatomy into inventory, currency and opportunity. As they say: the Villain who dies with the most loot wins. Carny Island is the business of necronomics — Monopoly for the death industry.

Sunrise brings a Shrift change. The nocturnal nastiness of Crookwood slumbers, giving the Villain time to count the night's loot. But Crookwood does not close when the sun comes up; it opens for business. Daylight brings a different kind of opportunity, including the chance to raid a funeral — a particularly brazen daylight activity.

When a tabletop game begins, each player logs in or registers at carnyisland.com. Their phone identifies them to Uncle Shrift, so Shrift knows who has entered the game. When a host invites players to a party, they can also complete a pre-game profile interview — a question-and-answer session conducted by some of Shrift's dogs — allowing the game to get to know its victims before play begins. During the game, players enter grave IDs through their phones. This tells Shrift where they are in Crookwood and what they are doing. The phone therefore becomes the player's identity, private portal and in-game tracker, exposing their board coordinates so opponents can locate them and launch attacks.

All the time. At any time. Before a tabletop party, players can use the video game to stock up on weapons and polish their gameplay. During the party, a player can attack any opponent at any time with any weapon. For example, stop at grave A01 and enter that grave ID into your phone. A01 opens on the screen and you begin robbing it by tapping to remove the substrate. Every other player now knows you are at A01 and digging. They can select a weapon, enter A01 as the target and launch an attack. Because the game knows who is playing and where each player is in Crookwood, the attack plays out on the target's phone. Players who would normally be waiting for their turn remain actively involved, while the grave robber must dig, loot and defend against threats such as incoming ballistic pigs. Movement may take turns. Combat does not.

The board is a checkerboard of gravestones dressed for Halloween, with a unique code on every stone. It is printed as a plastic-coated poster roughly the size of a small dining-room table, creating the shared physical map across which players move their phones. At the end of the party, the players can sign the board and keep it as a memento of that Halloween.

Crookwood is now one large stage: Level One of a ten-storey haunted house that is actually a ghost train ride. The game begins on the ground floor when the ride breaks down and the player learns they must continue on foot. Crookwood includes the cemetery, basement, Morgue, Chapel, Funeral Parlour, several mausoleums, the Pinnacle, Camel Back Ridge and the Howling Forest. The basement contains a tunnel leading to the Gates of Hell, behind which Cybil Munt — Uncle Shrift's mother — is buried. Shrift conducts the Monster's test drive in that tunnel, which is full of horrid creatures called Raspers. They guard what remains of Cybil, and that is not much because Shrift ate most of her. Weather and successive states of destruction transform the landscape — including the possibility of being snowed in — giving this single stage substantial variety.

You can never win Crookwood. You can rob its graves, make GITCOIN, build 'Steins, gather more loot than the other Villains and survive long enough to call a run successful. You can also finish owing Carny: negative GITCOIN is debt. When desperation sets in, Gweedo's allows a Villain to pawn lives as collateral, although one life must remain for play. Crookwood remains either way. The Villain who dies with the most loot may win the run; nobody defeats the place.

Carny is all wrong. The game, like life, has no 'rules' — only choices and consequences. When you're 'on' Carny, it is like going to Vegas: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Carny is a vacation from life's rules. It rarely prevents a bad decision or tells the player how a tool ought to be used. DOGMA reads intent through damage, excess and proportionality; JuJu remembers the pattern, and Crookwood responds. You cannot play Carny wrong. You can only discover what wrong costs.

You are the Villain: a three-foot nothing thief wearing a skeleton suit. Crookwood is full of 'Boners' — Carnies wearing skeleton suits — and the Villain believes it can slip through the yard disguised as one of them. The Villain is ageless, sexless and has no definable racial characteristics. It is a Villain for all people. Clements rejected the assumption that a game protagonist must default to a recognisably Western character; beneath the skeleton suit, the Villain belongs to whoever is playing.

Cats have nine lives, and dogs hate cats. Carny is ruled by DOGMA, a religion created by dogs, while Crookwood is patrolled by Uncle Shrift's dogs. Giving the Villain nine lives makes it something they are already inclined to hunt. Each death spends one life while Crookwood remembers what happened; the ninth death ends the run.

When a player loses a life, the Villain loses any limbs it happens to be wearing and is dumped outside Crookwood's gates. A dead cat — a shredded cat corpse — is left where the Villain died, marking a place now soaked in its blood. The player keeps all accumulated loot but loses all energy. Any grave it disturbed remains disturbed. Death removes the Villain from the yard; it does not undo what happened there.

The Villain begins with nine lives. Each death costs one life; losing all nine lives is Game Over. After each of the first eight deaths, the Villain is dumped outside Crookwood's gates and can return. The precise state retained or reset after Game Over remains subject to final implementation.

Punishment. Losing a cat life strips the Villain of its worn limbs, removes all energy and throws it outside Crookwood's gates. The world may remember the death, and a life may be pawned deliberately at Gweedo's, but neither fact makes losing one a resource. Death costs.

Because I wanted the real world to tower over it. At three feet tall, the Villain is dwarfed by Crookwood: gravestones become obstacles, graves become shelters and ordinary structures become formidable landscapes. The scale makes everything look larger, more dangerous and harder to survive.

Because that is the game. Robbing graves is its whole point and purpose. In the West, we are scared of death — but nobody has ever come back complaining. Graves are protected by law and treated as sacred across societies and religions; robbing one is among our deepest taboos. But on Carny, nothing — absolutely nothing — is sacred.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, one of horror's greatest novels, and her creation has shaped horror ever since. Grave robbery violates the sanctity of the dead. Building a Monster from those desecrated parts and giving it life crosses another taboo. Carny combines the two: steal the body, build the 'Stein and turn resurrection into necronomics.

Crookwood is a graveyard and the ground-floor level of Carny Island's haunted-house ghost train. Its name begins with Rookwood Cemetery in New South Wales and the Australian expression 'crook as Rookwood', meaning very ill, out of sorts or dubious. Clements has always been fascinated by graveyards. Nightmare and ATMOSFEAR used a graveyard as their board; a childhood toy featured a mechanical skeleton sitting up in a coffin; another childhood game, Haunted House, contained small luminous ghosts; and growing up in Manly meant riding the ghost train at Manly Wharf. Those memories converged to create Crookwood.

Because any ghost train ride is a film set of sorts: skeletons on wires, theatrical lighting and visible machinery. I extended that idea by making Uncle Shrift a game-show host. My cinematic background allowed me to introduce a Hollywood aspect to the haunted house and give it infinite depth. Smoke, wind and rain machines can change the weather; strobes create lightning; speakers deliver atmosphere and music. Carny is like a musical, and songs play an important part. Instead of stopping to read rules, the player can hear what is happening through the story being sung.

Carny Island is a travelling amusement park owned by two Lebanese brothers called the Bogan Bros. 'Life's a breeze when you're Lebonese.' The park is hauled in a convoy of trucks between seaside destinations and is located on the Brooklyn peninsula for the game, allowing the real local weather to enter its systems. Named in honour of Coney Island, its centrepiece is The GraveRobbers Ghost Train: a ten-storey haunted house, half of which extends down the side of a cliff. At high tide, sharks can enter Pirate Cove — and blood lost by the Villains drives them crazy.

The Bogan Bros are two Lebanese brothers who own Carny Island and transport the amusement park between seaside destinations in a convoy of trucks. Their operating philosophy is also their slogan: 'Life's a breeze when you're Lebonese.' The Lebanese community is an important part of Sydney, and the brothers are a nod to that community — recognition that Australia is a multicultural society. There is a larger message in their ownership of the travelling carnival: take away religion and take away the borders, and people can all get on and have fun together.

The GraveRobbers is the ten-storey Big House in which Carny Island takes place. It is both the building and the ghost train ride — not a separate attraction housed inside it. Crookwood occupies Level One, where the ride breaks down and leaves the player to continue on foot. Half of The GraveRobbers extends down the side of a cliff toward Pirate Cove. At high tide, sharks enter the cove, and blood shed by the Villains drives them crazy.

Mongril is a reincarnated Holy Man rescued by Uncle Shrift from the Crookwood pound one minute before he was due to get the shot. He now lives with Shrift in the compound on top of the Bulge. Mongril is the antithesis of every cartoon dog that ever walked: he helps in the Crematorium/Pizzeria and the Morgue, gives players readings, tells their fortunes and fronts the DogGones — a band of dogs that also serves as the Chapel choir. As a Holy Man, Mongril invented Mongrilism, a form of DOGMA, the religion practised by all dogs. The DogGones provide Carny's soundtrack and remain alert to every sound in the yard. When the crickets fall quiet, a tin can is kicked or the frogs stop croaking, something is wrong. An attack by the dogs can be life-ending.

POX News reports who has died and what killed them. Players can tune in before choosing a target to judge which graves may be worth robbing, turning obituary, scandal and bodily condition into market intelligence. THE SHIT provides a second channel: rotating newspaper headlines that periodically reveal hints about recent deaths. Take Bob. Bob does not have a last name because only parts of him were found beside the train tracks. Obviously, robbing his grave would not be particularly productive.

The Chapel is where a Villain goes to confess its sins and pick up an extra life. It is also where Carny's borderless irreverence becomes explicit. Jesus speaks with an Australian accent because sacred figures do not belong behind national borders. Carny imagines him with a great sense of humour: anyone walking around Australia telling people he was the son of God would have copped relentless ribbing.

The Morgue is a fucking smorgasbord: rows of refrigerated boxes containing corpses that have suffered every manner of death. It is a great place to visit. Once. Sudden power outages can trap a greedy Villain inside, where the visitor soon perishes alongside the inventory it came to rob.

Muma Maria's Pizzeria is Crookwood's combined pizzeria and crematorium. Bodies are crisped.

Shrift likes to amortise the infrastructure. Why waste a perfectly good oven? In Crookwood, catering and corpse disposal are simply two uses for the same heat.

Gweedo is a black-market pimp for body parts and an arms dealer. FSU Gweedo's is short for 'Fuck Shit Up at Gweedo's.' Accessible at any time through the main interface, it is a whole other world contained inside a shipping container visible on the outskirts of Crookwood. Players can buy and sell organs, body parts, gas masks, body armour, storage tanks and miraculous tools and weapons. Mr ChopChop is a robotic slicer and dicer that makes dissecting corpses fun; another option is a gas-turbine, multi-barrel frozen-pea shooter. Why rob a grave when you can simply buy the missing part? Gweedo's runs body-part specials that disappear faster than a supermarket price check. Gweedo is a shifty motherfucker, regularly investigated by POX News for selling infected parts. Players can also spin Deadice's Wheel to win body parts, play organ poker, take credit or pawn lives as collateral. Absolutely no refunds.

Necronomics is a word I coined for the business of the dead — Monopoly for the death industry. Bodies, organs, limbs and valuables move through a grotesque supply chain involving the graves, Morgue, 'Stein construction, Gweedo's, Chapel, Pizzeria and Crematorium. In Carny, death is inventory, biography, risk, debt and GITCOIN.

The Law of the Jungle is JuJu. It is the accumulated, remembered consequence of how a Villain behaves. DOGMA judges the intent behind an action; JuJu is the law that follows the Villain through Crookwood and across its lives.

The JuJu Index is shown as a face on the interface rather than a number. It begins smiling. As the Villain's JuJu plunges, the face frowns, then grimaces and finally turns red with anger. The response spreads beyond the interface: the weather changes and the game itself becomes darker. JuJu makes the Villain's moral temperature visible in the whole world.

DOGMA is the religion of dogs. It rules Carny Island, and Mongrilism is one of its forms. Dogs are fine with killing if it serves a purpose, so DOGMA is not a pacifist religion and does not treat every death as a sin. Within the game, it judges what a Villain does with a tool rather than merely whether it owns one. Carny permits the act; DOGMA reads its purpose, intent and proportionality, and JuJu delivers the consequence.

Sugar is energy from donuts. The Villain spends that energy moving through Crookwood, avoiding danger and robbing graves. As Sugar falls, the Villain becomes slower and more vulnerable. At zero energy, it dies.

Excavation is removing grass and substrate from a grave. The player taps to dig through the grave layer by layer until the coffin is exposed. Weather, tools, Sugar and the noise made while digging determine how difficult and dangerous that work becomes.

The Friggin' Pendulum of Fickle Fate is a spiked wrecking ball that drops from a wall and obeys the laws of gravity. If a Villain is in the wrong place at the wrong time, that is the end of a cat life. The ball drops, swings and gradually exhausts its energy before being winched back up. Its hub then advances about 10 degrees to a new bearing and releases it again. This cycle continues forever, sweeping the danger across Crookwood instead of repeating the same path. As it swings, the ball eventually begins destroying Crookwood itself.

It changes navigation from where to when—and then changes where as well. A Villain must read the rope, shadow and moving danger band, duck at the right moment or use an open grave as shelter. The ball can gouge tears in the earth, expose the basement below and force the Villain to find another route to a grave. It can also unearth corpses, making them easier to rob. The ball is agnostic: Boners that stray into its path can be cleaned up along with everything else. How weather affects the ball remains unresolved, and the behavioural system governing the Boners still needs to be written.

Because Carny operates on real-world engines: gravity, weather, Sugar and physical effort. A Villain also has freedom of choice. Use a shovel to dig or use it to kill. That is not random. That is intent. The player creates the circumstances they play in, and Carny's systems respond to those choices. Noise alerts the dogs. Blood excites the inhabitants. The misuse of tools affects JuJu. Permanent damage changes navigation. A Villain who sneaks around quietly could navigate the whole game without upsetting its delicate balance. That is possible. The chaos begins when the player's actions disturb it.

The system is called Escalating Chaos. Sound talks to the dogs. Blood talks to the inhabitants of Crookwood. A Villain's intent talks to JuJu, while Sugar tells the body how much work it can still do. Digging creates sound, spends Sugar and exposes bodies, loot and blood. Weather changes the ground. The wrecking ball changes the routes through it. Death spends a life but leaves the blood, disturbed graves and damage behind. Each action speaks to another system, Crookwood answers and the chaos escalates.

Sound talks to the dogs, and the level of sound triggers the escalation in both their response and the game's response: Sound, Dogs, Ghosts, Traps, Aerial Units and finally Shrift. JuJu runs alongside Escalating Chaos, but it is triggered by intent rather than noise. Hit a Boner with a shovel once and it might be a mistake. The game notices, but it waits. Hit that Carny with the shovel twice and that is intent, my friend.

Yes. Carny Island is located on the Brooklyn peninsula so real local weather can affect the outcome. The colder it is in Brooklyn, the harder the ground becomes and the harder it is to rob a grave. My intention is to illustrate Crookwood in dry, wet and frozen states, with rain and snow visibly transforming the yard. I wanted something other than the game — and something other than a human coder — to have control over the conditions a Villain must survive. The real world changes the work under the shovel.

KJFK is the four-letter station code for the weather observations at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. It is the live weather source Carny Island pulls from to establish Brooklyn's conditions. Those observations help determine whether Crookwood is dry, wet or frozen, allowing the real world outside the game to change the conditions inside it.

Yes. The rising tide masks some of the noise Villains make, as does the wind outside. Both create natural sound cover and reduce how easily the dogs can hear activity in Crookwood. They do not make a Villain silent, but they can change when it is safest to move or rob a grave. Real tides and weather therefore feed directly into Escalating Chaos.

The Moon affects the tides, and the rising tide can mask the noise a Villain makes. Moonlight also changes visibility, shadows and how exposed a Villain is while crossing Crookwood. There is no reliable evidence that people behave more strangely during a Full Moon, but publicans will tell you their hotels go nuts. Carny borrows that folklore to colour Shrift's mood and the theatre without pretending it is scientific fact. An experienced Carny vacationer will still choose a dark, stormy night: less light provides visual cover while rain, rising water and outside wind help mask the noise.

New York time. Carny Island is located on the Brooklyn peninsula, so New York's clock is authoritative wherever the player happens to be. The date, daylight, weather, Moon and tides all begin with the time in New York before the game accelerates the day inside Crookwood.

You play at 3 a.m. Carny does not invent a special rule merely because you should probably be in bed. The game still reads New York time and lets its ordinary systems handle the rest.

Uncle Shrift is Crookwood's funeral-home owner, resident mortician and graveyard keeper. He is the host of Carny Island—and a closet cannibal. But Uncle Shrift is not quite a man in the ordinary sense. He is a manifestation of the ShapeShifter.

Uncle Shrift's role is to fuck with Villains. He upsets Crookwood's balance by getting on the Black Dog and rolling hand grenades down the Pipe in his cottage. The Pipe feeds a gravity-fed network running to the graveboxes. Villains can hear the grenades rattling through the pipes before the distant, muffled explosions begin. Shrift does not merely host the game; he interferes with it.