Ahh, that was a nice February! We hope whatever antics you got up to, you had a good month! February was pretty busy for us, so let’s try and cover a lot of ground as quickly as possible.

First off, Obscura’s currently discounted! We’re taking part in the Women’s Day event and Steam’s own Visual Novel Fest, so the discount will last until the 10th. If you’re looking to pick up the game and get a second date with Vesper, now’s a good chance! We also took part in the Storyteller’s Festival, which was extremely good fun! There are a lot of incredible narrative-focused games during that event, and we’re always grateful to Two and a Half Studios for hosting it and honoured to be included.

Now, circling back to that “second date with Vesper” business, on Valentine’s Day we put out the small update we promised for this year. The update has the general collection of typo fixes and making sure all our branches and variables were working the way they should’ve been, but we also added to the unlockable Extra Story, giving players the chance to hang out with Vesper and explore a shopping street. It’s a small thing, but we want to share our love and appreciation for you every way that we can.

Getting the Extra Story update out was the priority for the front half of February. Mugi was able to spare some time to give Vesper standing sprites and make a CG for them in between her hard work getting our merch prepared. That’s something else we announced on Valentine’s Day! 

While the store isn’t ready for shoppers just yet, we wanted to finally confirm that we are going to make some merchandise. Mugi is currently in the process of quality control to make sure the stuff we’re making satisfies her standards (she does not want sub-par art going out to you!). We’re looking forward to finally opening up for business! The merch selection will start off fairly small, though I think you’ll like what we picked out. And we don’t want to keep the merch options small forever, of course!

The last bit of news from Valentine’s Day that’s important to share is that the Rotten Raccoons are expanding our operation slightly. The actual Rotten Raccoons team is going to remain the same and keep doing what we’re already doing, but three of us (Yamiochi, Mugi, and Violet) are also going to expand into visual novel publishing. Our publishing team, Kaguya Project, is going to focus on bringing incredible indie VNs over the language barrier, and we’re really excited about the first team we’ve partnered with! What’s important for Obscura fans is that we’re going to consolidate our web presence a bit, so when merch drops, we’ll be selling it under the Kaguya Project umbrella. Don’t worry, it’s still us!

Meanwhile, Tobi kept on making rad materials for Francesco’s second chapter! A big theme of his second chapter is exploration and adventure, so she is sending Fran and Vesper off on a lot of interesting trips. Here they are about to go do something else interesting 👀

And that’s February! We had some big splashy news that really dominated the month, but there’s still good work going on in the background. March has already been pretty lovely to us and we’ve barely even started it, so I can’t wait to see what else it has in store for us! We’ll be back in April to share all the fun.

Love,
The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝