Press & creators
The Tally
A cozy horror life-sim about a company town, a charity that genuinely does good, and a secrets economy in which the player is not special.
What to call it
| Title | The Tally |
|---|---|
| Not | “The Solance Foundation” — that is the fictional charity inside the game, and the voice the rest of this website is written in |
| Genre | Cozy horror life-sim / immersive sim |
| Platform | PC |
| Release | In development. No date, and there will not be one until it is close enough to be true. |
| Price | Not set |
| Engine | Custom simulation core; Unity shell |
| Team | Very small |
| Website | thetallygame.com |
The hook, in one paragraph
You take a job at the most trusted charity on Earth and move into its company town. The work is real — the wells exist, the vaccines reach people, the accounts are clean. The neighbours are kind, and most of them mean it. You can spend forty hours decorating your kitchen. You can also be erased from existence in your sleep, by a neighbour, using the same systems you have been using on them.
Lift that verbatim if it is useful. No attribution needed.
What makes it different
- The charity is not a front. There is no scene where it turns out to have been a lie. The good works are real, and the game is about what they cost — which is a harder question than an evil corporation.
- The player is not special. Steal, surveil, plant, bribe, blackmail, report, burn, kill — every choice the game gives you, it gives to everyone. Your neighbours run the same systems on you, whether or not you are looking.
- Two ladders, both viable. The honest path genuinely reaches the truth. It costs time and control rather than being a trap or a joke.
- Losing takes the thing you were protecting. Get caught and you keep your rank, your house and your kitchen, and lose everything you knew. Die and you come back as a new hire who can burgle your own old house during its 48-hour quarantine.
- Cozy and horror at once, continuously. Not cozy first. Between the crimes you are choosing wallpaper, and that is why losing hurts.
If you need a comparison
Writers usually reach for Papers, Please for the desk and the paperwork, Disco Elysium for the interrogation of a place, Shadows of Doubt for a simulated town you can burgle, and Stardew Valley for the hours spent making a house yours. None of those is wrong. The one that surprises people is the last one, and it is the one we would keep.
Assets
Screenshots, key art and logo lockups will be downloadable here as a single archive. Everything supplied is cleared for editorial and video use, including monetised video, with no permission needed and no embargo.
A note on this website
Every other page here is written in-fiction, as the Foundation's own staff and donor site. The Solance Foundation is not a real organisation and is not based on one; the name was screened against real charities before it was chosen. Nothing on the site is a claim about anybody who exists.
If you are quoting the in-fiction pages, they are fair game and they are meant to be read that way — but that is the game talking, not us.
Contact
Press contact to be added before launch. We would rather show you this gap than a made-up address.
Wishlist
The Steam page is not up yet. When it is, this is where it will be — and wishlisting will be the single most useful thing anyone can do for a game this size.
There is no mailing list and no form here collecting anything in the meantime.