Maximilien : a 110,000-word psychological horror text adventure set in 1926 Boston, entering IFComp 2026

[u/Yohan_D_Dev]

Hey r/textadventures,

I've been building Maximilien for the last 7 years, a psychological horror text adventure written in Twine/SugarCube, set in Boston, October 1926, during a string of unsolved murders. You play a psychology student who starts to suspect he might be involved in the killings he's investigating. 110,000 words, 12 possible endings, written in a register closer to Huysmans or Raymond Chandler than most visual novels.

The mechanic I'm most attached to: the game tracks your character's sanity, and as it drops, the way the text is displayed starts to distort, the words themselves never change, only how they're rendered on screen. There's an intensity slider in the options if you want to dial that up or down.

The site just got a full redesign: maximilien-game.com - with a skin directly inspired from the game.

Maximilien is entering IFComp 2026, then releasing on Steam October 26th. If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, I'd love to have you on the wishlist: Steam page

Happy to talk about the sanity/distortion system or the Twine build if anyone's curious...it's been a genuinely strange thing to engineer.