I Located in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, the Lemonade Games team lived in a rented house sandwiched between two vintage shops. With former antiques professionals and years of game-making experience joining the team, the idea for the studio’s esoteric adventure game began to come together. “We spent a week conceptualizing, making art, taking photos, watching films, and prototyping,” says Creative Director Ally MacLean-Hennessy. “It was a very organic way of shaping the game, and the spirit of that week continues into the way we work together today.”

In “Mystique: Haunted Antiques,” Its creators Described as “a game about a struggling antiques store run by four of the worst women I’ve ever met,” players slip on the platform sneakers of Jem, a fashionista and business owner struggling to run her struggling antiques curation business. Using her recently acquired, professionally useful psychic abilities, Jem will pierce the veil between life and death to track down troves of high-quality goods. “Players will travel to jobs such as the homes and estates of the recently deceased to search for cursed items and use information gained from communicating with spirits to find the most valuable items to take home and sell,” says MacLean Hennessy. From string-bound gaming magazines and lava lamps to cursed vases, players will examine and inventory all kinds of mysterious antiques as they progress through the game.

Jem is joined by a cast of lovable, problematic prima donnas. “The women of Mystique are partly inspired by the wave of con artists, con artists, and divas of the late 2010s and early 2020s, including Anna Delvey, Caroline Calloway, and Elizabeth Holmes,” Allie points out. “I can’t help but be drawn to them, in part because there’s a morbid thrill in watching people behave badly, but also in a way that I feel a genuine affection for them. There’s something so liberating about mentally stepping out of the psychodrama of modern womanhood and existing as someone who can commit incredibly selfish, self-centered, extravagant acts and still consider herself the moral high ground. Maybe they’re on to something.”

Mystiques: Haunted Antiques takes its paranormal cues from Tulpamancy, a phenomenon that originated in Tibetan Buddhism and has inspired other strange and eerie media, such as David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks. “Tulpamancy currently exists primarily as a subreddit for people interested in the boundary between ‘reality’ and ‘imagination,'” says MacLean Hennessy. “There are lots of people who believe they can manifest entities through faith and will. We’re interested in them in the same way we’re interested in the female con artists of our current cultural moment. These are people who can construct the reality they want to exist for themselves. Who are we to tell them what is real?”

MacLean Hennessy are clear that Mystique: Haunted Antiques, which took inspiration from Italian horror classics like Suspiria and self-consciously girlcore movies like Jennifer’s Body, is not a cozy game in the modern sense of the word. “We were exploring stories of spiritual affliction, and these filmmakers knew how to bring it to life in a glamorous, stylish, extravagant way, which is what we really love and are inspired by,” they say. This strange and fresh blend of influences also extends to the soundtrack (which follows the brief: what if a 1970s detective thriller had a hyper-pop soundtrack?) and the game’s fashion, which is influenced by playfully eccentric brands like Schiaparelli and Moschino.

Lemonade Games is passionate about infusing its fantasy worlds with plenty of vulnerability and authenticity, drawing from a wellspring of personal experience to create a game that McLean Hennessey sees as an expression of the studio’s soul: “If the people making this game can find elements of themselves, their friendships, their experiences of the world in it, and feel a sense of relief, laughter, or catharsis from playing it, that would mean a lot to us.”