At this year’s Gamescom, I had the chance to interview Mandy Wong, the creative director and narrative designer of Zeitgeist Studio’s upcoming daylight-horror narrative adventure, NAME OF THE WILL! The hand-drawn aesthetics, the lingering and fairly oppressive atmosphere, as well as the attention to detail put into the demo had me immediately captivated, and so I’m really excited to showcase this interview with a few more insights into what inspired the game and what challenges came for Mandy whilst developing her first game. Editorial Note: This interview was recorded on Wednesday, the 26th of August, 2026. I transcribed the audio verbatim, marking any additions to the transcript with square brackets and omissions from the script with round brackets. Some questions have been adjusted to better fit the answers. The interview appointment itself was arranged through StridePR who reached out to me on behalf of the game's developers. What’s the game about? NAME OF THE WILL is a daylight horror narrative adventure where you become a perfect cult member inside of a 34-story architecture living with all of your peers, and by day you abide the rules and try to befriend your neighbours. By night, you like wander around and discover the secret, and then it ties back to what actually traps the cult. And all these people are very, very happy, obviously and don’t tell any lies, right? On the surface, yes, they are wearing like a uniform mask, which actually, in the demo that we’re showing, there is one cutscene that shows that people’s true faces are being revealed under that (…) mask. Oh, interesting! With the game being a horror narrative adventure, how did you think of setting it in broad daylight? So, I watched the film Midsommar. It’s a film that is also set in the daylight about a cult as well. It’s much gorier than our game, but I was really impressed. I mean, this was like the first time that I heard the term daylight horror, and while I was like doing a lot of research about like how cult leaders run their cult and how cult members are being trapped into this kind of community, I came across that film. (…) Which made me think: “Oh, this is probably like the direction that we want to go with.” Do you think that the game is scarier because “the horror” is happening out in the open? So, I think it’s like different types of scary. I do absolutely love horror games (…) having jump scares or maybe like, you know, walking inside the dark where you can’t really see yourself or maybe like see the roads. This is some type of horror that a lot of people are exploring, and we wanted to try something differently. That’s why we made it into this daylight horror setting, and it really captures the theme of the game well, too, you know? Like, how to become an individual inside a kind of like a community with full conformity. […] I think that what we’re trying to approach in this game is like the slow and suffocating fear of whether you want to be part of it or not. So players have a lot of agency about whether they wanna conform or if they’d rather escape from the Hope cult? So we have like a system that’s called like a counter system, and you only have seven strikes to determine whether you will escape from the cult or not, and ultimately we have like four different endings for it. (…) I wouldn’t say that we are necessarily giving a lot of agency to the player. Well, obviously players can do whatever they want in the cult but there is constantly that system and like the neighbours telling you what to do, what not to do and whether you want to follow it or not. So, it really kind of makes you think about whether your free will actually matters at all. What happens if you don’t follow […] what people are telling you to do? This is what we wanted to explore. This sort of struggle and, you know, the agency itself is a thing that we wanted to talk about. What is the hardest part about making a game like this? Everything is hard because it’s our first game, to be honest. We didn’t come from a game dev background, so we had to learn everything from scratch. Everything is just so hard. […] We were drawing everything by hand on paper, and then we scanned it frame by frame, and it was just so slow, so we had to change it to digital, which helped us get faster, but it was [still a lot of manual labour]. Also, like writing the narrative. It’s my first time writing the narrative as well, so I had to learn a lot of things. Then we eventually [hired] someone who has a background in film to help me edit the script, just to make it more polished. So, apart from like the production side, I think a lot of indies will have experienced this thing that we found at some point: It’s how difficult it was to combine the narrative and the puzzles. Because we really want to make the puzzles seamlessly weave into the narrative instead of, like, just puzzles [existing] for the puzzle’s sake. We have been really thinking about how to make the level design entertaining in the sense that people can actually really delve themselves into the world feel. Another challenge has been translation. Some stuff is pretty culturally specific, such as the counter system actually! So, in the UI, currently, you can actually constantly see how many scores you have, but we intentionally made it so only Chinese people understand because we calculate the numbers in a different way. Chinese people count the numbers on one hand, so we use this in our UI as well, but for non-Chinese speakers, it might be ambiguous, and then they probably don’t understand. We are trying to kind of like balance that out [so that we can] leave a little space of ambiguity like this, but also trying to make it a little bit more universal to gamers from other cultures. It really ties back to why we make this game. […] Ultimately, we were from a fine arts background, which has nothing to do with video games, and we just found that video games are a really powerful medium for storytelling and also like to build empathy for people among different cultures. We talked earlier about the most challenging parts, which is… everything. What is one of the most enjoyable parts about making a game like this? So I am actually making the game together with my husband, and I think that working with my partner is both painful and enjoyable in a sense. We actually did the action scenes for all the characters ourselves. So, I love to kind of tease and torture him by retaking the scenes like 40 times or from time to time and see him suffer in a way. So you record with real people and then trace afterwards? Kinda like rotoscoping? Yeah, so for the “enemy”, the father, I mean the cult leader, I asked my husband to run in this public car park nearby. I videotaped him running around the car park, and I’m, like, “oh no, that’s not right. Redo. That’s not right, redo.” And it just took us 48 takes to have that perfect shot. By that time, he already did like a full cardio exercise. That’s hilarious. Speaking of the cult leader, where did you take the inspiration for the cult and its values? So, we are inspired by the Buddhist concept that’s called “shared karma”. Basically, it’s about individual action tying back into communal values. And I think that this is what we wanted to explore in this game as well. Beyond that, I also like a lot of true crime shows about cults and stuff, and obviously, there’s the film Midsommar, too. Yeah. You just got a publishing deal as well with HYPERREAL. Did your workflow change now that you’re working with a publisher? Oh, my god. It’s so much better. We actually spent almost like two years just to find a publisher, and because of that we changed a lot of like how to market our game, how to speak about our game, and it’s just… we felt so relieved having this publisher deal and we’re just so grateful to find a comrade to to be with us because you know, being a first-time developer, it is always very getting pulled under water. You don’t know where to go, you don’t know where it leads, and so having a little bit of guidance, having that someone who tells you “we are handling this together”, it really helps us mentally and physically to focus on the production, and to like get it to the finish line. Speaking of which, do you have something in sight in terms of like a release date? Yeah, I think we’re releasing it on in early 2027. We have released a public demo last year in October, and we’re very much working on polishing that and including some new content for our next year release as well… but yeah we we haven’t thought about when precisely it will going to be released. But you will know when we’re ready. Is there anything else that you’d like to share about the game or tell people? The game isn’t just hand-drawn and heavily stylised but it also features a lot of plot twists. [The experience] really depends on how the player engages with the choices. We just hope that the players will get to sort of experience [what’s it like to] be in the cult and try to see if they want to escape from it or not. Thank you very much! Thank you! I had a blast talking to Mandy about the game and checking out the game. If you’re curious about the game after having read all this and if you wanna check it out for yourself, you can do so over here! Make sure to wishlist the title, too, while you’re at it, as that’s a free way of helping the developers out. This post was originally published on Indiecator. If you wanna get in touch with me, feel free to stop by for one of my Twitch streams. For business inquiries, please reach out via email.