Previewing The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham

I had the pleasure of attending IDGA NYC's Game-A-Palooza event in Brooklyn on October 7th, which gathered over 50 indie developers to showcase their projects to media, fellow devs, publishers, and the public. The first demo I made a beeline for was the impressively ambitious sophomore title from Causeway Studios, The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham, which the studio recently announced at PAX West. The Final Cut is a first-person mystery-adventure game, which joins the wave of modern titles embracing Full Motion Video (FMV) as a central narrative and design element.

I got a chance to play a demo build, which took just under an hour or so to complete, and also spoke with Michael Futter, Causeway’s Director of Operations and Publishing. We discussed their strategy for the turbulent modern games market, and the big design swings the studio is taking with this game.

Evers Family Values

Before the show, I played Causeway’s first game, The Haunting of Joni Evers, a very solid first-person haunted-house adventure anchored by an excellent lead voice performance from Kelly Pekar as Joni. You have to break the curse infesting Joni's family home by uncovering the secrets and inner lives of her absent family members. This includes her sister Sara Evers, father Coulson Evers, grandmother Noreen Cunningham, and mother Lilith Cunningham. Causeway certainly proved their strong narrative chops with this title, deftly avoiding family-melodrama clichés and developing layered characters, even those without full voiceover, with as much care as Joni. 

There's no survival-horror looting or intricate puzzles, just a house that looks creepy at night, growing stranger and stranger as a malevolent supernatural entity closes in. The house is chock full of fun little details to scour over, and definitely feels like an old family home that’s infused with stories and memories. Joni is clearly jaded as the remaining custodian of the strange Cunningham house, alienated from her family even as she lives among their belongings and histories. Pekar exquisitely narrates bittersweet memories from years past as the story takes you through each family member's spaces in the house, and Joni confronts wispy Vestiges of their personalities that commune with her.

Futter told me Joni was "designed to test our production pipelines. Ensure that we could ship together. Especially with what’s going on in the market right now with how difficult funding is, especially for first-time studios. We knew we needed to get out there, make a game, ship a game."

You can see the strong design foundation Joni has laid down in Lilith, but Causeway’s increased ambition is immediately apparent. The demo began with an FMV cutscene of title character Lilith listening to an unexpected voicemail from a character named Sara, who is apparently in distress, and entering the strange hotel Sara called from.

Checking In at the Alpine Movie Manor Hotel and Drive-In

The Final Cut introduces some very distinctive new mechanics on top of the expected first-person adventure formula. Lilith is armed with an Astral Place which features a classic corkboard waiting to be filled with mysteries. And if this wasn’t enough, you’ll soon be shifting the very fabric of reality as a supernatural film editor in your Astral Place.

The nature of this magical film reel, The City of Dreams, is teased in The Haunting of Joni Evers in various archival news clippings and other details, saying the film is an amorphous experience that plays out differently for each viewer. Futter told me these pieces, along with new voice cassettes from Sara, were patched into Joni after Causeway announced Lilith in September. "We did a whole update for Joni that brought pieces of Lilith back into that game to create those deeper connections. But we also feel very strongly that every story that we tell needs to be an entry point," Futter explained. 

You control Lilith as she arrives at the Alpine Movie Manor Hotel and Drive-In, hurrying to find Sara, only to find it seemingly devoid of guests or staff. The first mystery on your corkboard is finding Sara’s room number and unlocking the sealed room key cabinet behind the front desk. The solution can be found in a few corners of the hotel, and I appreciate the puzzle flexibility. Even in the contained demo, your mystery board quickly fills with queries; red string begins webbing across the cork as you track down clues, and the mystery deepens as you open more boards to click between.

Just like in Joni, it feels nice and tactile to click objects in the environment, give them a little spin, and pore over them. If you see an icon as you hover over key text, clicking adds a Post-it to the table under your mystery board. Attaching Post-it clues to the associated question on the board advances you through the interlocking mysteries involving Sara, the film reel, and other characters entwined in this strange supernatural conundrum.

The Mystical Cutting Room Floor

The game presents its FMV in several forms. You can find a video journal from Sara, Lilith is glimpsed in the opening, and the demo presents two permutations of a scene from The City of Dreams which, strangely enough, seems to feature a guest in the hotel - investigative journalist Todd Gallagher - who is in cahoots with Sara. We also get interjections on several TV and projector screens from a mysterious MC character in a suit who first appears on hotel screens in a conventional promo, but quickly appears in your Astral Place as you begin operating with the film reel as well. Hilariously, due to my demo experience, this MC character is played by Futter himself.

After finding the film reel in Sara’s room, you see an FMV scene of journalist Todd frantically searching through files, before being shot at and fleeing from two suited pursuers, but managing to escape them with a red file. After investigating Todd’s room to learn his commitment to the truth, you manifest a new film clip, which you can splice into The City of Dreams reel with a satisfying mini-game to operate an old-school film editing console in your Astral Place. This changes the scene to show Todd evading the guards undetected without getting the red file, valuing his safety over the truth. Changing the film also shifts reality, letting you access new paths, but also scrambling the rooms (and even the items within them) in the process. This newfound power also seems to draw the attention of a strange spirit that is also fixated on the film reel.

When I asked if the team had always planned to incorporate Full Motion Video in their second game, Futter said, “We did not set out to make a Full Motion Video game. It was something that we decided on because we picked this combination hotel and drive-in, which is based on a real place in the San Luis Valley in Colorado. We picked that, and it’s like, how do you not do film when you have a drive-in theater?”

The game is dripping with Lynchian inspiration, with Futter citing Mulholland Drive as one of their main guiding points, and I spotted several nods to Twin Peaks in the demo as well. Futter also referenced the music of the band Lord Huron as an inspiration, and added they “use the term ‘Desert Noir’ because it does have that really twangy, a little bit of Southern Gothic, a little almost O.K. Corral showdown, and you’ll hear it in the music.”

Futter told me it has been "a very interesting learning experience starting to marry the film world and the game world." Causeway certainly seemed conscious of balancing the time thoughtfully between sitting back and watching the FMV segments with more active exploration and investigation gameplay. To help with this new medium, Futter told me in a text after the show, "The FMV direction will be a collaborative effort between Laura Shatkus (our casting director), Kris Katrosh of New Harvest Creative, and Causeway creative director Greg Rogers."

Lilith Cunningham’s Red Carpet Treatment

This type of game is tough to lay out in a demo, something Futter himself said was an early marketing concern, but I walked away quite impressed with what I saw of The Final Cut. Everything I liked about Joni was firing on all cylinders here: the central setting dripping with history and atmosphere, and Jen Sweeney doing a great job playing Lilith. It remains to be seen whether the complicated new elements will land with the depth promised for the full release, but I quite enjoyed the blend of sleuthing and splicing on display. 

The FMV videos were slickly produced with convincing cast performances (including Futter, who had some of the coolest dialogue in the demo!) It'll be fascinating to see how far this team can push the live-action video to match Causeway's bold and detailed visual style, which makes great use of in-engine lighting and production design. Seeing a small studio attacking such an ambitious concept with confidence and precision was an invigorating way to start my day at Game-a-Palooza.

The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham is coming in 2027.