Seek out the Light in a Misty deck
The Light in the Mist is an upcoming project by PostCurious, a company that specializes in making beautifully-illustrated narrative puzzle games. This time, they chose to use the tarot as a medium to tell the story of a missing friend. Your goal is to find the clues and solve the mystery behind her disappearance. It will launch on Kickstarter on September 21.
The game uses the structure of the tarot as its basis: the 56 cards of the Minor Arcana - divided into Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles - will lead you to unravel the secrets of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. To do this, you will select a Major Arcana card. The card will indicate how many Minor Arcana cards you need to resolve it. You will then try to collect them and figure out a keyword. You will search the keyword in the accompanying booklet, and read a piece of the story. Sometimes you will be able to unlock more than one story bits, or keep a clue you found for later.
The tarot card meanings have inspired the puzzles themselves (for example, the Hermit puzzle is about self-reflection), and, like a tarot reader uses a spread arrangement to read the cards, you will at times have to find the correct card arrangement to piece the clues together. The traditional Rider-Waite-Smith tarot was the jumping point for the illustrations: some cards contain direct visual influences, others hint at it indirectly after you reveal their message. The puzzles are non-linear, so you can choose your own way of figuring them out. Some have multiple answers too, which then lead to different passages in the storybook.
This is a non-replayable game which takes approximately 5 hours to solve. You will then be left with a functional tarot deck, or can pass it along to a fellow gamer to enjoy.