Saint Maker is a horror visual novel created by Yangyang Mobile. It is effectively a kinetic novel, as there is only one path and one ending, but the player gets to make smaller choices that change the dialogue and the little details of how a scene plays out.
Saint Idelora's convent is a place where parents send their troubled daughters to be reformed. A teenage girl named Holly Bertram is sent for reasons she's not quite able to remember, and meets another teenage girl named Gabriella, and the no-nonsense nun Sister Adira. She finds Saint Idelora's to be creepy and a bit stifling, but not too terrible… until her first night, when she hears chanting and sees saint statues standing over her bed and staring at her.
It turns out, Saint Idelora's has some dark secrets, and Holly will need to uncover them if she hopes to make it out alive…
It is available on Steam here.
Saint Maker contains examples of:
- Ambiguous Situation: The saint statues themselves. Did they really move in the night and stare down at Holly? Are they really full of innards when broken? How conscious are the souls of the other girls trapped inside? How much of it was real and how much was an illusion of Holly's given to her by the ghost girl?
- Angsty Surviving Twin: Holly had a twin sister, Liana, who was Driven to Suicide before the events of the game, and Holly blames herself for being complicit in her parents' abuse of her. Holly's reaction to this is what got her sent to Saint Idelora's.
- Artistic License – Religion: The nuns and convent are clearly meant to be based on Catholicism, which does not permit nuns to show their hair from beneath their habits as the nuns here do. However, this was likely done to help differentiate between the various nuns that appear in the game, and to help foreshadow that Sister Adira and the young nun in the flashbacks are the same person, as they have similar hairstyles.
- As the Good Book Says...: The nuns at the convent, particularly Sister Adira, have a tendency to quote the Bible to justify their harsh practices.
- Break the Cutie: The young nun from the segments in the convent's past; all she wanted was to guide young girls to what she felt was a happier, more virtuous life, and was horrified by how harsh her fellow Sisters would act towards the girls in their care. Then little Cornelia was deemed a "lost cause" and killed, despite the nun's pleas. That nun grew into the harsh and cold Sister Adira.
- Companion Cube: Little Cornelia carried a unicorn doll during her stay in the convent, which was taken from her due to unicorns being "against God." She eventually got it back, but it had been shaved and had its horn removed, and the nuns called her ungrateful when this understandably drove her to tears.
- Content Warnings: The steam page for the game warns that the game contains child abuse, religious abuse, homophobia, and graphic depictions/discussion of suicide and death, urging players to consider this before purchasing.
- Cute Ghost Girl: Cornelia becomes this in the ending, in which she gets her face back before passing on.
- Dark Secret: Saint Idelora's convent would seal the girls they considered "lost causes" inside the hollowed-out statues of the saints. The ghost of Cornelia, whom Holly has been seeing and speaking to, all but states she is only one of their many victims.
- Driven to Suicide: Liana took her own life before the events of the game, as a result of her parents' religious abuse.
- Facial Horror: The ghost girl Holly keeps seeing has a gaping hole where face should be.
- Let the Past Burn: In the climax, Saint Idelora's is set on fire and burned to the ground, an act that seems to release the spirits of girls that lingered there. Holly and Gabriella are satisfied to see it burn, taking its long legacy of abuse down with it.
- Living Statue: The saint statues, which move on their own, whisper, and have a functioning internal organ system. Maybe.
- Nun Too Holy: The nuns at Saint Idelora's are cruel, verbally abusive, and murder girls by sealing them in hollow statues if they think the girls can't be "saved." We see this the most in the past, in which several of them frequently appear to verbally abuse Cornelia and the young nun.
- Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Holly and Gabriella, the other girl at the convent. The two of them slowly bond throughout the story, finding each other as their sole comfort there, and Gabriella even offers to let Holly move in with herself and her mom as they leave the convent. It never overtly goes into romantic territory, but the game is sometimes marketed as being a yuri game.
- Religious Horror: Set in a convent? Check. Spooky nuns? Check. Bible verses? Check. Themes of religious indoctrination and religious trauma? Check and check.
- Self-Serving Memory: The player can invoke this themself in Holly's flashbacks to growing up with Liana. Liana was frequently punished for "wrongdoings" by her religious parents, and Holly remembers tending to her afterwards, though whether she helped emotionally or by treating her wounds is up to the player. Eventually, however, it's revealed to be this trope at work, Holly finally, tearfully admits "This isn't how it happened" and has to face the fact that she didn't do anything.
- Shout-Out: Sister Adira's surname, Verdolagas, is also the surname of Father Damaso from Noli Me Tangere.
- Stern Nun: Sister Adira is this… at least in the beginning, before she's revealed to be fully aware of and complicit in the convent's practices.
- Tears of Remorse: Sister Adira sobs when confronted with Cornelia's ghost among the flames, crying to her that she's sorry for what happened to her and that she couldn't save her.
