How We Built a Feng Shui Curse: Behind the Scenes of The Lotus Loop

We don't usually talk about how the sausage gets made. But The Lotus Loop was such a strange and complicated project that we thought you might want to know what goes into building a mystery game that involves Chinese zodiac cycles, a fictional school fire from 1990, and a drag-and-drop bagua puzzle.

It started with a question

The original idea was simple: what if you were investigating a mystery, but the biggest obstacle wasn't the killer... it was yourself? What if you'd already solved it once, but something erased your memory, and now you had to solve it all over again using notes your past self left behind?

That became the core of the time-loop mechanic. You're not just investigating the 1990 fire. You're investigating your own previous investigation. The case file is full of documents you apparently collected months ago: a diary in your handwriting, newspaper clippings you highlighted, a coded message you left for yourself. The tension comes from the fact that your past self clearly knew something terrible, and she went through significant trouble to make sure future-you could piece it together.

The cultural research rabbit hole

We knew early on that we wanted the puzzles to be rooted in Chinese cultural systems rather than generic escape room fare. That meant bagua trigrams, Chinese zodiac cycles, five elements theory, and feng shui spatial logic. What we didn't anticipate was just how deep that rabbit hole went.

The bagua formation puzzle alone required weeks of research and design iteration. Each of the eight trigrams has associated elements, directions, family positions, and symbolic meanings. Mapping seven characters to the correct positions meant creating a logic puzzle where zodiac birth years, elemental associations, and narrative clues all had to converge on a single correct solution. We wanted it to feel like genuine deduction rather than trial and error, which meant every piece of evidence in the case file had to contain at least one clue that pointed toward the formation.

Building the retro computer

One of our favourite parts of the game is the interactive USB archive — a website designed to look and feel like a late-1990s school computer terminal. Green text on black background. A file directory you can browse. Student records with accommodation assignments, registration details, and personnel files. Hidden backup fragments that only appear if you know where to look.

We built it because we wanted the game to feel like more than just paper. When you're flipping through printed case file pages with one hand and browsing a digital student database with the other, the investigation feels real in a way that a purely analog game can't quite match.

The three-ending structure

We spent a lot of time debating whether to have multiple endings. Some puzzle games have a single correct answer and that's that. But the story of The Lotus Loop felt like it deserved more nuance.

The standard ending is what most players will reach first — it resolves the central mystery but leaves some threads open. The true liberation ending requires deeper investigation and a specific insight about the curse's origin. And the hidden secret ending... well, we're not going to tell you how to find it. That would defeat the purpose. But we will say that the clues are all there, hiding in plain sight, if you're paying very close attention.

What we learned

Making a culturally grounded puzzle game is hard. Making one that respects the source material while remaining accessible to players who may not know anything about bagua or Chinese zodiac is even harder. We think we found the right balance — the game teaches you what you need to know through the evidence itself, so you don't need any prior knowledge. But if you do know about these systems, you'll appreciate how the puzzles use them authentically rather than as window dressing.

The Lotus Loop is our most ambitious game yet. We hope it shows.

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