BAD OMEN BUREAU · INDEPENDENT GAME STUDIO
Atmospheric games. Strong mechanics. Unusual stories.
Our current case is Until the Bells Stop, a dark-fantasy action roguelite where every bell makes Blackwood Parish worse.
ESTABLISHED BEFORE THE INCIDENT. PRECISE INCIDENT DISPUTED.
CURRENT GAME
CASE FILE 001DARK-FANTASY ACTION ROGUELITE
NINE BELLS. ONE NIGHT.
DON'T BE THERE FOR THE LAST ONE.
Fight manually as the Gravedigger, build increasingly catastrophic combinations, explore Blackwood Parish and adapt as every bell changes the world around you.
LATEST FROM BLACKWOOD
0:25 A basic shovel starts losing the argument. Three upgrades change the terms.
WATCH ↗
0:32 A production pass on making Blackwood feel used, wet and properly unpleasant.
WATCH ↗
0:18 A shovel should feel like a shovel, especially when it hits the ground this hard.
WATCH ↗WHAT WE MAKE
Dark does not have to mean humourless, and strange does not have to mean vague. We care about how a game feels to play, how its world sticks in your memory, and how its systems become more interesting when they meet.
Places with history, mystery and enough personality to be remembered after the run ends.
Manual, readable action with weight, clear decisions and attacks that feel worth pressing.
Mechanics that interact, compound and turn a sensible plan into something much more interesting.
Enough mystery to invite curiosity, without stopping the game every five minutes to explain itself.
FROM THE JOURNAL
Development notes on balance, combat, Blackwood and the questionable administrative process of turning a cursed night into a game.
VIEW ALL JOURNAL ENTRIES →
What actually goes into a deliberately small first demo: three Burial Rites, a tight upgrade pool, five relics, Bell Omens and enough Blackwood to make another run tempting.
READ ARTICLE →
How years of machine-learning work became unexpectedly useful for Monte Carlo balance sweeps, build sampling and finding bad numbers before a human has to suffer through them.
READ ARTICLE → How a simple manual weapon becomes the centre of knockback, graves, bones, armour breaks and increasingly unreasonable chain reactions.
READ ARTICLE →ABOUT BAD OMEN BUREAU
Bad Omen Bureau is an independent game studio creating atmospheric, mechanically driven games with strange worlds, unusual stories and a strong sense of place.
We like deliberate combat, systems that collide, worlds that change, and mysteries players discover by paying attention rather than reading a wall of exposition.
We make games about situations that have already deteriorated.
CONTACT
One public address for now. It reaches actual humans.
If the matter involves an actual supernatural emergency, we are regrettably only qualified to make a game about it.
