The Great Sassanelli – An Interactive Novel

A beautifully written interactive novel about managing a travelling circus in WWI Europe:
An entire novel’s worth of hand-crafted main story content

A colourful cast of crew members and recruitable performers with bespoke storylines

Dozens of locations to visit freely all across Europe

A plethora of random encounters across towns and on the road

Light economy simulation: manage money, supplies, and your troupe's morale

Overarching puzzle gameplay: track down the mythical safe haven of Cuculia

You play as young Johan, ringmaster dilettante, as he leads Madame Gloria’s Circo Sarabanda through ravaged lands.
While war breaks out all around you on a scale never seen before, you are tasked with keeping the circus afloat – until you find that mythical safe haven vagrants, outcasts and circus folk have been telling stories about since the beginning of time: Cuculia, the Kingdom of Birds.
Travel between towns and across borders, earn money by staging performances for a populace shaken by loss and grief, manage your resources wisely, and protect your people from danger as you solve the overarching mystery of Cuculia's true nature.

THE GREAT SASSANELLI’s evocative prose offers a unique cast of fully realised NPCS, reams of sparkling dialogue, and an abundance of carefully crafted, well-written stories set in a war-torn world – some light-hearted, some tragic, some both.

In your travels, you will meet a number of Gifted Performers you can hire – meticulously crafted NPCs with their own goals, interests, sympathies, and aversions, each coming with their own special act, story arc, and gameplay perks.


Hundreds of choices allow the player to pace, branch, roleplay and control a multitude of enthralling storylines, some of them tough and morally complex.

Solve the mystery of Cuculia, the Kingdom of Birds – a mythical safe haven for travelling folk, a campfire tall tale, rumoured to exist in many places at the same time, or nowhere at all. Will you be able to pin down its true nature? In a series of puzzles involving real-world poetry, deduction and timing, you’ll edge ever closer to the heart of its secret – until the curtain rises on the Grand Finale.

In a lightweight economic sim closely entwined with the game’s story, you’ll make narrative choices that control the ebb and flow of money, fame, employees, and troupe morale, always keeping on the move to find new audiences to entertain.

Inspired by prominent art movements of the early 1900s, the unique, painterly art style immerses you even deeper in the peculiar, magical-realist world of THE GREAT SASSANELLI.