Features

• A novel-length, text-based, choice-driven narrative

• A tale told through tarot: draw a card, react, and watch the world change

• Divergent storytelling: will you pursue the mystery of the falcon-slayer’s lance? the intrigues of the Senate and the ‘Five-Winged Owl’? the Disorder of Venturemice and their heavenly clambers?

• Cultivate complex relationships with a large cast of characters: Kaia Apanchomenia, the nestless mystic; the Beast of Gevaudan, disillusioned chevalier; the Speaker of the Senate, wickedest orator in the Commonewealth; the Winter King who would be Caesar and the Burrowmeister who would refuse them; and many more

• All-star contributors: character art and animation from Casey McDonald of the viral video Wings and Tooning Out the News, hand-drawn tarot from Caleb Hosalla of Eerie Crests, UI design by G.C. Baccaris of The Twine Grimoire and DEVOTIONALIA, urban design by Konstantinos Dimopoulos of Ex Novo and The Sinking City

• Inspired by Greek mythology and literature, our fractured memories and histories of the Roman Empire, Byzantine mosaics, Arthurian legend, modernist literature from Ulysses to Orlando, and the whole dusty basement of your local university’s Classics department

• Developed in Unity using ink

History

We Are Free Mice was born from a setting for Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies. (That setting, The Classics, is still available, as is its younger child-friendly sequel, Venturemice and the Ruins of Heaven.) Every essential part of We Are Free Mice was created around the family gaming table: the Commonwealth, its isolation, its currency, its royalty, and even the legacy— “we cannot exist outside of nature; predators have shown us the thinness of our triumphs […] we ourselves are merely mice” — that drives We Are Free Mice’s plot.

While it was originally imagined as a language game, We Are Free Mice quickly became a relationship game. The most interesting thing about the Commonwealth of Free Mice isn’t its vocabulary but its social structure. How do all these mice live together in a city that is equal parts misremembered antiquity and mouse biology? How do they nest? What does it mean to live above or below the ground? What are their coming-of-age and marriage customs, their religious and governance traditions? Do they bring each other casseroles? What do they drink instead of coffee?

Ultimately, We Are Free Mice is an attempt to answer this question: if you take the human out of human stories, what might be lost — and what might remain?

About Zero Summer Storytelling

Zero Summer Storytelling is an independent game studio based in Louisiana with core team members in New York, Greece, the Philippines, and more.