press kit

follow

A folkloric horror compass for iOS, Android, and the web. Walk anywhere old after dark — the device finds 60 hand-curated entities from Irish, Scottish, and Welsh folklore.

quick facts

  • Studio: DreadWorks Studio (Stephen Flynn, single developer)
  • Platforms: iOS, Android, web (PWA at follow-wine.vercel.app)
  • Price: Free, with a one-time optional $4.99 “Veil” tier (4 cosmetic + quality-of-life unlocks)
  • Age rating: 17+ (frequent intense horror themes; 18+ in-app gate)
  • Genre: Folkloric horror, location-based, single-player
  • Engine: Next.js 14 PWA wrapped with Capacitor 6 for native shells
  • Languages: English (UK) at launch; Irish (ga-IE) and French localisations targeted for the post-launch roadmap

the catalogue (verifiable)

  • 60 hand-curated entities, each documented to a specific written source (Hyde, Gregory, OS Letters of 1839, Folklore Commission, Campbell, Croker)
  • 4 tiers of in-fiction lore per entity, gated by encounter count
  • 411 bespoke audio clips across the entity bank (~50 MB), authored prompt-by-prompt rather than stock-licensed
  • 59 photoreal entity renders for the live-encounter camera overlay (60th in commission for Donn Fírinne, the v585 mythic-tier addition)
  • 9 ritual types wired to specific phone sensors — silence (microphone amplitude), stillness (accelerometer), walking circle (compass heading), face-down phone (gyroscope), cover the lens (camera brightness), breathe (microphone rhythm), trace ward (motion path), iron (haptic hold), echo (microphone speech detection)
  • 7-act story arc across hundreds of hours, finale gated on prestige descent + samhain thin night

the angle

Most location-based games (Pokemon GO, Ingress) use real geography as a canvas for invented mythology. Follow does the inverse — it uses real folklore as the anchor and lets the player's actual environment trigger which entities surface. A Bean Sí appears more readily near a graveyard because that is where the 1839 Ordnance Survey Letters placed her, not because the developer needed somewhere picturesque to put a spawn point.

The narrator is the unique mechanism. Áine — voiced by an Irish whisper voice and addressed in second person — speaks fragmentarily and accumulates information about the player across sessions. By act 5 of the long arc she is referencing details about the player's real walking history that she should not be able to know. The reveal in act 7 reframes everything that came before.

The folklore grounding is unusual for a horror game. Each entity's lore tier text reads as transcribed archival material — parish registers, coast guard logs, schoolchildren essays from the 1937 Folklore Commission collection. Players who finish the catalogue have effectively read a small monograph on the celtic horror tradition.

pull quotes (cleared for citation)

“Most horror games do violence to you. Follow does folklore around you.”
“She has been listening since the start. You didn't know that.”
“The compass points at things most people don't see. Walk toward them. Identify, banish, or run.”
“You needed to learn to listen, and there was no faster lesson than the bean sí keening a name almost yours.”

screenshots + assets

Press-resolution assets are available on request. Six HERO screenshots are pre-composed (the compass, a field-log entry, the bestiary, the pass-the-haunting share, the story arc, the first-banish keepsake). Each is captioned with one five-word headline.

For a 30-second trailer, see /marketing/trailer-script.txt (text + storyboard).

App icon, logo, and brand guidelines: /icon-512.png — the master sigil. The app uses one accent color (#cc8833, ember amber) on a near-black background (#060606). Display font is Cinzel; body font is system monospace stack.

fact-check answers

Q: Does it claim to detect real ghosts?
No. Follow is fiction. The 18+ adult-content gate at first launch and every piece of marketing copy consistently treat the entities as folkloric fictions being explored.

Q: Where does player data live?
GPS coordinates are stored in the player's journal entries on a Turso (libSQL) database, bound to a client-generated UUID. Camera frames and microphone audio never leave the device — they are processed in-browser for sensor rituals only. No third-party tracking SDKs.

Q: How many people built this?
One. Stephen Flynn. The folklore curation, audio direction, narrator voice, app architecture, and every line of in-app prose are single-author. Some image generation (the entity silhouettes) is AI-assisted via Pollinations.ai Flux Schnell, with hand-authored prompts per entity tied to its specific folkloric source.

Q: Is there a Veil paywall?
No paywall. The full game — 60 entities, 9 ritual types, 7-act story arc, all features — is free. The optional one-time $4.99 Veil tier unlocks four cosmetic / quality- of-life features (alternate compass skin, extended evidence retention, share-card frame variants, supporter flair). Core gameplay never gates behind the Veil.

Q: When does the seasonal content fire?
Three thin nights a year — Samhain (31 October–2 November), Bealtaine (30 April–1 May), and Lughnasadh (31 July–1 August). On these dates, seasonal entities get a 6× spawn weight boost and the act-7 finale becomes reachable for prestige-2+ players.

angles worth covering

  • Folklore-grounded design — the catalogue as a pop-vector for the actual celtic horror tradition, not a generic monster-spawn engine.
  • Narrator-driven horror — Áine as the mechanism, second-person AI-voiced presence accumulating knowledge of the player across sessions.
  • Sensor rituals as physical input — phone hardware repurposed as ritual instruments instead of tap-to-banish gestures.
  • Single-developer studio — what one person can ship in 2026 with a strong content discipline and a folklorically anchored design vocabulary.
  • The samhain finale — gameplay content that only opens on the calendrical thin night the folklore says it should. A real-world clock as a game gate.

contact

Stephen Flynn
DreadWorks Studio
flynndeise91@gmail.com
Press inquiries replied to within 24 hours. Review builds available on request via TestFlight (iOS) or Play Console internal testing track (Android).