Nationwide Software — Independent Studio
A solo studio that treats games as authored works. It borrows the grammar of genre to build stories that unsettle and compel.
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A solo studio that treats games as authored works. It borrows the grammar of genre to build stories that unsettle and compel.
The ending comes first — everything else is built backwards.
Resonance is not an accident. It is designed.
NationwideSoftware is the studio of a single author. Every line of code, every drawn frame, every line of dialogue answers to one vision: a story worth staying for.
Japan has a genre called iyamisu — a compound of iya (“unpleasant”) and mystery: a mystery that leaves you feeling worse than when you began. Like Kanae Minato's Confessions, these stories wrap society's infected places and the floor of human nature inside the pleasures of genre, and keep you reading to the last page. That is what I make.
The work always begins at the end. I don't draw the first scene until the last frame is decided. The charge and the afterglow of watching everything planted in the opening and the middle come due in the finale — I believe that is the greatest pleasure a story can give a person.
A fairy tale with two faces. Lucy has forgotten who she is. Trapped in a nightmare that refuses to end, she runs, leaps, and fights through whimsical stages crowded with colorful monsters — charming on the surface, wrong underneath.
Scattered diamonds hold her stolen memories. Each one you recover plays back a fragment of the real world — and those fragments wear a very different face. One layer at a time, a meticulously plotted story peels the fairy tale back, until the truth beneath proves crueler than any nightmare.
The free demo — the prologue through chapter one — is out now on Steam.
Jeon Yeon Jun writes, draws, and builds every part of the worlds under the NationwideSoftware name. The characters you meet are drawn pixel by pixel, by hand.
Genre is the doorway. What makes you open it is the grammar of horror and thriller; what waits inside is addiction and self-loathing, responsibility and repression, and the quiet cruelty people inflict without meaning to.
The dialogue and the characters carry the fingerprints of everything I've passed through. Films and series, stage plays and comics, old console games — more homages are hidden in there than I can count. One day I intend to pull them out, one by one, in a developer commentary.
A great story can save a person. I know this from experience. In the years when the world felt hateful and hard to bear, what held me together were the stories — in films, in shows, in games and comics. As long as I was deep inside a story, no worry could find me.
Loving myself is still hard. But I can love the stories I made.
Just as great storytellers saved my life, I want to save someone's hours with a story that resonates. Games are the most powerful tool a storyteller has ever been given. A novelist labours over every event and every line to stack hundreds of pages before you finally feel for a character. In a game, the moment the player moves one, they already are that character. Not empathy — identification. Immersion is the default here, and yet games that stake everything on the story itself are still rare.
What I pursue is a story faithful to its genre, meticulously plotted, one that leaves a deep resonance and something to think about when the ending arrives. I build the ending first. I don't take people aboard without knowing where I am taking them.
Stories that satisfy everyone are already being made in abundance on enormous budgets. I face what they leave untouched: the dark interior of human beings. Lucy's Nightmare, on self-destruction and addiction, and the next work, The Love Doll, on twisted desire and salvation, are where it starts.
What saved me were stories other people made. Now I hope a story I made will do that for someone else.