Our fellow Kyosians,

I'm so, so happy to say that we finally published Mentor's route!!

(This turned out to be a looong update - I'm probably overcompensating for the lack of them lately. If you'd like a TL;DR, please scroll down to "The meaty stuff" section, which contains the most important information that I recommend reading before playing Mentor's route, especially if you already played Nod's.)

Mentor's route

It's hard to argue that we didn't take our sweet time... I have to admit that COVID, in particular, impacted us in more ways than I thought it would. We were more or less fine while working internally, and in fact, we already had a stable build back in December (!) last year, but the post-production stage of the job, which required involving more people from all over the world, was... wild.

In any case, we hugely appreciate your patience (and hope that you have been and will continue to stay safe!), and I actually have a couple of ideas about making content updates more frequent - regardless of the state of the world, so to speak - which I'd like to share further below.

In the meantime, a couple of words about Mentor's route: it took a huge amount of effort to plan and put together, as it is quite different from the other routes in its structure and execution. There are two main characters in it: Mentor herself, of course, but also Kyos.

A large part of this chapter is dedicated to the world that Minotaur takes place in, since learning more about it is crucial in order to fully experience the overall story and the impact of some of its endings (especially the one called "The Empress", wink-wink). Mentor's route is very lore-heavy, but it's integral, and without it, Minotaur simply wouldn't be complete. Though we aren't, of course (to quote one of the new characters), "just going to read to you from 'An Abridged History of Kyos'". This is still very much a chapter about Fifteen, and since her story is intertwined with the lives of other Royce residents, there are many clues about what's going on there, as well as tons of smaller secrets and references.

Speaking of personal assistants, even though it's the route in which Ollie is least featured, it contains some very important information about her. Which is delivered mostly indirectly (via the lore about the blue boxes, for example), but don't forget about the skits too!

(It probably is.)

In any case, please don't worry - just as I promised, the story of Nod and Ollie (and everyone else) will be resolved, but we do need to set some things up for that.

By the way, the sweet creature you see up there on that screenshot (in the center) is one of new Minotaur characters, and just like everyone else, these new characters were given voices, in this case by fantastic actors D.C. Douglas and Michael Schwalbe. Let's welcome them to the cast! They did an awesome job, just like the rest of the cast, and I'm really happy that we managed to produce the voice over for Mentor's route in current conditions, which was only made possible by great effort from everyone involved in this process. And since this is Mentor's route, it's worth mentioning in particular the amazing work of her VA, Rina Hoshino, who essentially had to play several roles in two languages. Seriously, her part was insane, and I still get goosebumps from her lines in the final dialogue. Here's a short clip from Salmix recording studio in Tokyo (another dialogue - Mentor is asking Arthur what's wrong):

https://twitter.com/rinahoshino/status/1395195633934376972

Nothing's wrong, obviously.

Now let's get to the part that I mentioned in the beginning of the update:

The meaty (or machin-y?) stuff

1) After you update to version 0.6, all your collected extras and obtained endings from Nod's route should be preserved! There's no way to check directly for obtained endings at the moment, but as long as the movies (on the extras screen) are present, this means that the corresponding endings are unlocked as well. To be honest, I'm proud that we managed to pull this off while still introducing the new chapter select screen, it was quite non-trivial!

2) However, you will still need to play through Nod's route to unlock its chapter select. Since a new checkpoint system is in place, there was no way around it, unfortunately... I'd recommend doing a normal run to refresh your memory a bit, but it's of course not necessary - you can simply blaze through it to initialize the checkpoints, and it doesn't matter which ending you get (see previous item).

Please note that the next 4 items on this list contain some spoilers for Nod and Mentor's routes, including the number of endings that Mentor's route has. I tagged these spoilers, but if you'd like to go in blind, I suggest skipping items 3 to 6 (but do come back for them later).

3) Mentor's route should be unlocked immediately as long as...

...you freed her in the concierge's room in Nod's route!

4) The new chapter select screen is here in all its glory (I think I already posted it in one of previous updates, but here's a reminder):

We hope it makes playing and getting different endings more convenient, though it's still a work in progress. I think we can make it more intuitive. In the meantime, just like I mentioned, to unlock it for a character (including Nod), you'll need to finish their route once first.

5) Endings: Mentor's route has...

...only one ending, but there's a "thing" that you can do (or fail to do) near the end. It will influence the outcome of one of the endings of Thea's route, which will be reflected on the chapter select screen:

I suggest taking another look at this screenshot after finishing Mentor's route and getting acquainted with the chapter select screen, I'm sure it will give you a sense of closure.

6) Nod's route bug fixes

• I have optimized Nod's route elevator descent scene to be less demanding on the hardware. However, it's still the most resource heavy scene in the game, and may cause crashes on some machines. But! Thanks to one of our players, we discovered (well, they discovered!) that the issue is most likely caused by these machines running Minotaur on integrated cards, and forcing the OS to use the discreet card instead solves the problem.

• A bunch of other minor fixes have been implemented, though not everything has been done for Nod's route yet, and it will get a final revision pass before the full release. For example:

...the post-Bygone fight optional puzzle will be remade (instead of examining that wall of text, Nod will interact with various areas in the room in a kind of "spot the difference" mini-game); Ollie will have a dialogue after "watching the sunset" with her in Maya's car (she will thank Nod for staying, to which he'll reply that he simply dozed off); we'll do a number of small text amends; and so on.

7) The soundtrack has been updated with new tracks from Mentor's route! Just like I promised, it's a free update, because what on Aya would we need money for? We also included some additional artwork, and since some of the tracks for Mentor's route are mixes which I made for its longer scenes, the extras folder for Mentor's route also contains individual tracks from these mixes. No secret this time, but I think the files are still worth checking out.

Well, what's next?

How's work on Thea's route coming along, you ask? Very well! Larger part of it is in playable state, though sharing screenshots without spoilers is becoming increasingly difficult. Wait, I found one...

Seriously though, I'm sure that we'll finish it before the end of the year (and maybe Unter's route too), but at this point, it's really hard for me to say how long the post-production stage will take. In our case, this stage usually includes licensing music, adding SFX, recording and adding the voice over, doing the translations, etc. So that's on one hand, and on the other, I'd like to make the updates more frequent, which is why I want to try something different. Here are several things that we can release in the nearby future:

1) The first part of Thea's route without the voice over: the music and the translations will still be there, though music won't be available on the OST until the route is fully released. Thea's route can roughly be split into three parts, and as I mentioned before, the first part takes place [spoiler]in Mira[/spoiler]. If this release goes well, we will later push the second part the same way, and then the full route. I want to release the first part in September. This year...

2) One of Richie's route's "paths". A "path" is a variant of Richie's route that takes place after an ending of Nod's route, or a combination of endings of several routes. Some of them are relatively short and can be done comparatively quickly. Minor spoilers (in case you haven't played Nod's route or don't want to know anything about Richie's route at all):

...the path that I'm talking about takes place after "To Be With Her Again" ending, and in it, Richie is looking for Nod (sorry, "Nod"), one of the very few survivors of the Royce incident, in Soma DC.

Some sweet Soma DC hand-drawn sketches from Adam (the path starts with Richie sitting in a Somian café):

Just like with Thea's route beta releases, it won't have the voice over, and the music, even though it will be in the game, will be added to the OST later, but the path will be fully playable. And again: you won't need to play it if you prefer to wait for full releases, since installing it will be optional. I do think it answers some very interesting questions about the story, though, and we'd like to release this path in parallel with Thea's route until the end of this year.

3) Now that one of new characters of Mentor's route is introduced, he can take his rightful place at the cards table:

The original idea was for him to tell Mentor a short illustrated horror story for every 8 cards you bring him, but then I thought: why not tell the story of what happened in the Northern Research Center 500 years ago? We're still figuring this part out, but for the moment it seems like a good candidate for a smaller update, and unlike the parts of Thea and Richie's routes, since the story is narrated by just one character, it might even come with a voice over right away. And who knows, maybe Mentor (and everyone else by extension) can get something out of collecting all 24 cards... You never know.

Okay, you can stop now

I was honestly going to! I apologize for the longread, though I do hope that you got something interesting out of it. We also hope you enjoy Mentor's route, and we can't thank you enough for your limitless patience! You're the best players that we could ask for, and you inspire us to keep working on the game and to try and make it the best it can be.

Which reminds me... Time to get back to work!

Love 🐧

Nick & u7committee