Mercuralia by Jacob Potterfield

In your search for a rare bird, you are caught in the tide of a mysterious ritual, a festival of living statues, and the ruins of an ancient floating city. Explore deeper into the festival grounds and talk to festival-goers.

Mercuralia is a mix of first-person exploration with visual novel elements. It takes about 30 minutes to complete.
CW: for brief descriptions of bodily harm and some coarse language.

Controls: #

MOVEMENT:****INTERACTION:****TEXT:[WASD] to Walk[E] to Interact when prompted[ENTER] or [CLICK] on text box to advance dialog[SPACEBAR] to Jump[B] to use Binoculars[SHIFT] hold to Run[ESC] to open Pause Menu
Graphics options and a chapter select feature can be accessed from the main menu.

Developer Notes 2/23/24: #

Mercuralia was a testbed to for a lot of new ideas around worldbuilding and graphics. Visually some of my big inspirations were block printing, the sculptures of Antoni Gaudi, and deep-sea landscapes. Like my other projects, it draws on conversations and imagery from dreams. I think it’ll be the last project to use the ‘walk around and interact with stuff’ structure for a while.
Along with the game I also included some process artwork made during development which is collected in a short booklet ‘MercuraliaSketchbook.pdf’.
The project will mostly remain as is, though if anyone experiences majorly game-breaking bugs I’ll try to address those.
I hope you enjoy.
-Jacob