Renting is one of the biggest griefs facing young people in Australia. The idea that we will never own a home, a place where we can stay comfortably and stably, and perhaps even hang artwork on the walls, haunts us. In developing Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (and a witch), Queensland-based developer Fuzzy Ghost took that haunting quite literally.
This upcoming game is all about being a renter at the mercy of a domineering force: a woman who is both a landlord and a witch, who serves as the evil representative of all landlords. She is an abstraction of an unfortunately common problem – of renters who just want privacy and safety, but are consistently made to feel uncomfortable in their own living spaces.
Developers Pete Foley and Scott Ford aimed to share their own pain and frustration in this game, while also providing a catharsis for players, particularly after hearing their personal stories of rental challenges. During development of Janet DeMornay, Foley and Ford asked renters to share their own horror stories online, swiftly realising that the game’s horror wasn’t quite so fantastical, and that perhaps it’ll create more meaningful, relatable connection than intended.
Fuzzy Ghost’s Janet DeMornay is renting as a horror story
‘We realised we’ve had a perfectly fine time in comparison,’ Foley said, of asking for rental story submissions. ‘What inspired this game is tales of landlords hiding under the stairs, or walking in on you while you’re in the bath.’
‘There’s a lot of landlords living in the property, secretly,’ Ford said.
‘Or dressing up as handymen to do inspections,’ Foley added. ‘We weren’t originally planning on gamifying any of the stories … but some of them have leaked into the idea of Janet hiding in the walls, things like that. It was humbling, for sure. These poor fuckers.’
Hearing these stories and how horrific they can be – how intrusive and soul-destroying – solidified the focus of Janet DeMornay, in the minds of Fuzzy Ghost. It also aided the coalescing of the game’s core concept: ‘you get to defeat your landlord.’
‘Early on, we just wanted it to be a communal bitch session where you just get together and feel less alone, because you realise so many other people are going through the same thing,’ Ford said. ‘Giving voice to those horrors, giving a form to that clutch of terror that we all feel, that inspired the game.’
‘I was thinking about what scares me, what makes me uncomfortable, and it’s the invasiveness of renting, and doing these awful applications.’
As Fuzzy Ghost explained, it’s not necessarily about demonising landlords, but on focussing on shared experiences, and creating connection through familiarity. There’s a disempowerment that comes from renting, and a power imbalance that can make renters feel hopeless.
To emphasise that power struggle, Janet DeMornay evolved into an escape room of sorts, where players are scrambling to find solutions to an array of twisting, strange puzzles. For Foley and Ford, it was a fresh challenge, to balance accessibility and logic, and get people comfortable with the ‘puzzle language’ of the game. With a dark (but hopeful) narrative and tone being the priority, it was a matter of weaving puzzles deeply into the story, and ensuring that each new clue emphasised the strange, discombobulating nature of the game’s magical apartment, and the influence of Janet.
Resident Evil actually served as a key inspiration, with this series’ item-based puzzles inspiring some of the challenges in Janet DeMornay, as well as the top-down third person perspective. While the game began as a first-person adventure, the switch was made later in development to ensure a tangibility for players, and so they could see the direct impact of Janet’s influence on a relatable, identified protagonist (in this case, a queer man named Andrew, newly renting an inner-Sydney terrace house).
‘They’re all housemates dealing with their own particular rental traumas,’ Ford explained of Andrew and his friends. ‘He’s the latest housemate, so he kicked off this new lease, which is the trigger of all the horrors in the game.’
Leaning into a magical-realist fantasy, Fuzzy Ghost aimed to stretch the limits of believability, and focus on creating an experience that, taken to the extreme, allowed players to laugh at their own circumstances. To abstract the idea of renting, and therefore understanding its many horrors better.
‘I think it allows for a lot more expression of how shit it is to be a renter,’ Ford said of the game’s fantasy tilt. ‘It allows for an approach to horror that’s more fun that doing a social realist game.’
Janet DeMornay is not interested in misery, but rather the acknowledgement of struggle, and the promise of a brighter future. ‘Horror is so good for bringing out and acknowledging how horrible renting is. Because it’s heightened, it’s not quite as miserable,’ Foley said. ‘It has a joyfulness to it.’
Creating Janet DeMornay in Queensland
What’s also novel about Janet DeMornay is that, while magical, it represents the very real stories of Fuzzy Ghost, as former renters in Sydney. When the game was born, the team was based in Sydney, but through the course of development, they ended up moving to Queensland. It was a cavalcade of factors that inspired the move, from rental stress, to the opportunities afforded by stronger video game funding, and a fresh developer community.
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‘The community is amazing,’ Foley said. ‘We were shocked. I was describing it to someone the other day as “queer until proven otherwise.” There’s this excellent monthly meetup organised by Brendan Keogh, and a bunch of other people, called Squiggly River. Everyone meets in a room at the library, and can bring experimental games they want people to try out and play. It’s just a gorgeous meet up of interesting people doing interesting things.’
‘There’s a chill to the Queensland scene. Everyone’s really humble.’
Per Foley and Ford, Screen Queensland have also been instrumental in their support, providing spaces for developers to connect, as well as funding day-to-day development. (Fuzzy Ghost have also been supported with funding from Screen Australia and other organisations.) Working within the Screen Queensland hub, the team was able to collaborate and share ideas with the teams behind Key Fairy and Momento in a ‘sweet, understated, but supportive’ environment, and gain valuable feedback.
Coming to grips with cultural differences in the state’s development scene, Fuzzy Ghost was also able to better understand their own experiences in Sydney, and how higher expenses and a ‘hustle culture’ shaped their game development processes, and work on Janet DeMornay.
‘Because everything is more experience, yet there’s less funding, the hustle vibe is so real,’ Foley said. ‘[There’s] the pressure of feeling like you need to make something commercial, but you also need to balance it with your full-time job, because you can’t afford to do it full-time.’
Moving to Queensland, the team was able to better focus their intent, channelling their experiences into a game that represents very real stories, and very relatable ones, with a distance that allowed for reflection.
Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (and a witch) is now approaching significant milestones, with a full ‘start to finish run’ done, and lots of polish to come. In the months ahead, the team will focus on recording and implementing voice acting, and refining the game’s edges, while also looking to what’s next. (‘We want to make some super gay games,’ Ford said.)
When Janet DeMornay finally launches, after years of development and indulging in the horrors, Fuzzy Ghost hopes it brings ample catharsis for their fellow renters, to solidify an understanding that while renting can feel isolating and uncomfortable, nobody is alone in feeling that way.
You can now wishlist Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (and a witch) on Steam.
