Don't Turn Around

A dark romance thriller visual novel where your choices decide if Veronica falls for her stalker or sends him to prison.

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Inspiration

Dark romance thrillers live in that specific space where danger and desire blur completely where the most terrifying thing isn't the stranger in the dark, it's realising you're not entirely afraid of him. We wanted to recreate that feeling interactively. Not just read it. Live it.

What it does

Don't Turn Around is a choice-based dark romance thriller visual novel. You play as Veronica: a woman living alone who has felt watched on her walk home every night through an empty valley. Tonight she arrives at her dark apartment, lights out, heart racing and feels a hand on her shoulder.

She turns around.

Erren. Tall. Dark hair. Deep green eyes. A voice like velvet: "Is everything okay, sweetheart?"

Through 7 intense conversation scenes you make dialogue choices shaping Veronica's response to the man who has been secretly watching her for months. He knows her coffee order. Her route. Her laugh. Everything.

A mid-game mini-game "Read His Eyes" adds a timed trust meter click rapidly toward Trust or let it fall to Fear which also influences your ending.

Two possible endings:

CAUGHT - Veronica keeps him talking, stays calm, mirrors his obsession just enough then calls the police. At the window as they take him away, he presses his palm to the glass and mouths: "Find you."

LOST - Veronica stops fighting what she feels. His devotion, his terrifying certainty nobody has ever known her like he does. She reaches for the lamp instead of the phone. "Maybe being found isn't so terrifying after all."

How we built it

Built entirely with MeDo using natural language prompts:

  • Designed the full story, characters, dual-ending structure and mini-game concept through conversation with MeDo
  • Wrote all 7 scenes with exact dialogue, internal thoughts, and choice options fed directly into MeDo as scene scripts
  • Generated character portraits using AI image tools
  • Used MeDo's multi-turn chat to build typewriter animations, flickering light effects, crimson UI styling, and audio layering
  • Mini-game "Read His Eyes" trust meter built through a single targeted MeDo prompt
  • Deployed with one click to a public URL

Challenges we ran into

Getting the choice tracking system to correctly accumulate resistant vs drawn-in choices across 7 scenes plus the mini-game result and route to the correct ending required very precise prompting. The atmospheric layering of dark ambient music and rain sounds without audio clashing also took careful iteration.

Writing Erren's voice was the hardest creative challenge he needed to sound genuinely dangerous and genuinely devoted at the same time, or the whole story falls apart.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The writing Erren's dialogue and Veronica's internal thoughts create real tension and emotion across all 7 scenes
  • The "Read His Eyes" mini-game a timed trust meter that physically puts the choice in the player's hands
  • A fully cinematic UI flickering lights, typewriter text, crimson accents, character portraits that feels like a real published visual novel
  • Two completely different endings that reward replaying to experience both paths
  • The fact that it was built in a few hours with zero traditional coding

What we learned

The more specific and cinematic your prompts, the more cinematic the output. Generic prompts give generic games. Writing Erren's voice in the prompt obsessive, velvet, unhurried directly translated into how MeDo wrote his dialogue. Your creative vision goes in, your creative vision comes out.

What's next for Don't Turn Around

  • Voice acting for Erren and Veronica
  • A secret third ending for perfectly balanced choices
  • Background scene illustrations for each scene
  • Sound effects door creaks, police sirens, rain on glass
  • A gallery mode to replay favourite scenes
  • More chapters because Erren always said he'd find her again

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