Though self-contained stories, both Subsurface Circular & Quarantine Circular use word-based inventory systems where you collect, use, and eventually lose conversational 'items' to progress the story. The games unfold through dialogue; take care when steering the conversation.

For Quarantine Circular's soundtrack, Dan le Sac returned to compose eight original tracks to accompany your time in the game. Each is unintrusive but responsive, illustrating the moments of mounting tension and deliberation as the remaining hours to save humanity run out.

Subsurface Circular (2017)

Bringing Gabriel to life was a team effort. We explored several concepts for our alien visitor in Quarantine Circular, with their final design a culmination of work from Gareth Davies, Daz Watford, & character artist studio Keos Masons. How's 'giant crab alien' for a design brief?

In Quarantine Circular, you'll make dialogue choices for multiple characters throughout the game. Those choices can and will affect their complex social dynamics, whether slight or drastic. Be welcoming, wary, or even hostile. Your approach is your own, just choose it carefully.

This game was just too good, seriously. It distilled the joy of conversation branches from adventure games so perfectly. Get you some "Ah, hubris" from a giant alien.

A small team of humans facing a world-ending pandemic and a strange visitor from the stars. Quarantine Circular's art gallery contains 24 sculpts, studies, and concept art pieces. By completing your first playthrough of the game, you'll unlock access to all of them.

We're sending out QUARANTINE CIRCULAR Steam keys to creators who want to play the game on their channels this week. There's still time to get involved if you want to be one of them! Fill out the interest form below and we'll be in touch ⬇️

We're into the second half of our legacy games celebration with Quarantine Circular! In our second Bithell Short, an unknown entity has come to Earth. A small group of humans now face a decision on behalf of their planet: Should they trust the stranger that arrived from the stars?

My first game for Bithell… well my first game ever tbh. So dope… and somehow they let me do 4 more, wild imo. (Also fingers crossed something shifts in the industry and I get to do more in 2026… kinda love making music for games man)

With the end of Subsurface Circular week, we're halfway through our legacy game celebration. This week was robots, but next week's game features another classic pillar of sci-fi: Aliens. See you there. Walk with the Architects.

We like making games. We also like talking about making games. In Subsurface Circular, we added our take on a developer commentary called BithellBot. Once you've completed your first playthrough, you'll have the option when starting a new game to add BithellBot to your next run!

All of the music you hear in Subsurface Circular was composed by Dan le Sac. Alongside the main soundtrack, you can tune in to what the Listener Teks are hearing while they're ignoring your questions. All Dan's work.

Subsurface Circular takes place in a single location and with a cast entirely of Teks, the game's robotic working class. With that kind of focus, we wanted to take care with the setting and character design to bring the world to life, even when the player sees only a small glimpse of it.

Why was Subsurface Circular a 'Short'? For one thing, it was made by a very small team in about five months. Beyond that, for us, it allowed us to experiment with design around a focused narrative; for the audience, it meant a self-contained story that could fit into busier lives.

How do you design a game that is played entirely through dialogue choices? Subsurface Circular started as a wall of notes. The main story beats were mapped out in a traditional three-act progression, but the plan for how it would all interact wasn't quite there yet. 🧵

We're sending out SUBSURFACE CIRCULAR Steam keys to creators who want to play the game on their channels this week. There's still time to get involved if you want to be one of them! Fill out the interest form below and we'll be in touch ⬇️

This week's game is Subsurface Circular, the first of our Bithell Shorts! A two-hour tale takes you underground, where strange disappearances among the robotic working class are coming to light. We shadowdropped Subsurface one day in 2017, but still it found its audience.

Over ten years later, we're still proud of the game we made with Volume. It may be a game about stealth, but we've had fun putting it back on the radar this week. Four more games in our legacy celebration to go! See you tomorrow for the next on the list.

Did you know Volume came with a user manual? Gisborne Industries really does care about its employees! It even had a heartfelt welcome message from CEO and all-round trustworthy guy, Gisborne himself.

For Volume's soundtrack, we had the pleasure of working with David Housden again. Its inspiration was a balance of old and new; a centuries-old legend told in a near-future setting. David took instruments such as the mandolin and Irish harp, then infused them with contemporary cinematic influences.

Some of Volume's rarer Steam achievements involved wearing disguises, using the invisibility Veil, and hiding in lockers. For a stealth game, that means most of you either got real creative with sneaking past guards, or you ran very, very fast.

Volume's stealth-action gameplay was heavily influenced by Metal Gear, and the design process was inspired by one of Kojima's own methods: using Lego to lay out the levels. Take a look at the level creator tools in particular and you'll spot the building-block style!

Volume was our first game to have voice-acted characters, with the talents of Danny Wallace, Charlotte McDonnell, & Andy Serkis. If you played Thomas Was Alone, you'll know Danny's voice. He plays Alan, the artificial intelligence within the military training simulator you've just stolen.

We're sending out VOLUME Steam keys to creators who want to play the game on their channels this week. There's still time to get involved if you want to be one of them! Fill out the interest form below and we'll be in touch ⬇️

And if you’re like “I’m a game dev & I don’t see how a narrative person who is also a historian is helpful for me and my non-historical game” Then you can read my design diary about some of the work I’ve done for Amberspire (which has a fantasy sci-fi setting) lunardivision.net/micro-and-ma...

I love Volume. It’s a love letter to Metal Gear and one of the indie games that inspired me to give gamedev a shot.

Our legacy game celebration continues with Volume! 🔇 Our second game was all about robbing from the rich with pure stealth action. Uncover, then unravel, the exploitative plots of Gisborne Industries by using the Volume to pull off increasingly ambitious heists over 100 levels.

spent a little time with #TronIdentity tonight. Interesting little mystery, super focused and stylish. kudos to the folks @bithellgames.bsky.social for doing some neat stuff and leaving room for a little philosophical musing as well!

Thomas Was Alone is SUCH a good little narrative puzzle game. You wouldn't believe rectangles could make you cry.

Thomas Was Alone week is almost over, but we have the rest of our legacy celebration to go. Here's to the game about rectangles that made all those future titles possible. 🟥

Thomas Was Alone's community took us by surprise, but uplifted our game massively. Fan art, streaming the soundtrack, and even just recommending the game to others came together to support TWA far beyond what we expected. 13 years on, our gratitude for it hasn't waned a bit.

today marks the first day I'm using my Amberspire manual proofs while testing the game, confirmed the book will be helpful

Thomas Was Alone's procedural soundtrack was crafted by David Housden. The first piece he composed was Where Are You?, a demo track that matched the tone so well it went on to become the credits theme.

Did you know that all of our self-published games take place in the same universe? While the Thomas Was Alone characters might not appear in their rectangular forms in our later titles, you may have picked up on easter eggs re: a certain group of 'Architects' here and there.

Danny Wallace's performance as the narrator made Thomas Was Alone the game it was. And it's not just us who think so: Danny's work was consistently praised in reviews from press and players, and the folks on the 2013 BAFTA Games panel agreed so wholeheartedly they awarded him Best Performance.

🟫 I remember playing #ThomasWasAlone back in the day, so I just poked around at my Xbox Achievements 🤗 A full 1000G across ~7h of play back at the very tail end of 2015. Blimey, it has been a decade 😳 Recommended! 🎮 #VideoGames 🕹️

Hands down one of my favorite games.

Thomas Was Alone began as a hobby game on a very limited budget, as many indies do. Though it's about artificial intelligences, it was the human connections that made folks care about it. That is, the connections the player felt towards the characters, and the ones between the characters themselves.

We're sending out THOMAS WAS ALONE Steam keys to creators who want to play the game on their channels this week. There's still time to get involved if you want to be one of them! Fill out the interest form below and we'll be in touch ⬇️

Our legacy game celebration begins today! We might as well start at the beginning. Thomas Was Alone was the very first Bithell Games title. Initially a flash game, our story of rectangles and friendship jumped its way onto major platforms and set in motion the future of our small studio.

We've sent out the first round of creator keys today - if you put a request in, check your inbox! Still plenty of time to request a key if you haven't yet, so get in touch if you'd like one! Our Legacy Games Celebration starts on Monday! 🥳

One of my favorite buildings, and has lots of small nods to others with the design elements.

For the morning crowd (just). We’re looking to celebrate some of our older work, if you’d like to share it with your audience, we’d love to get you some keys.

AMBERSPIRE 🌇 The Necropolis If you play Amberspire well, your residents will never want to leave. In which case, a Necropolis is a wise investment. It's also a reliable source of Ash, which can help construct buildings such as the Arboretum. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3350750/Amberspire/

📢 We're reopening creator keys requests for our older games! As part of our legacy games celebration, we've got fresh batches of Steam keys for several older titles. If you're a content creator who would like to showcase one of our games, details on how to get keys are below!

Played all of these. Worth picking up if you've not yet.

Streamers, we're celebrating our legacy games. Form is below. You got your choice of award-winning platformer, prescient stealth game, prescient visual novels, cyberpunk solitaire and... um, ominous math-based survival board game??? You got choices, details below 👇 🟥🤫🚆☣️🃏🪐

an uncanny, brilliant experience. Check it.

I remember really liking Subsurface Circular and it's basically 1-2 streams long