Founder
Marina Molarsky-Beck
Curator of 20th-century photography with a penchant for systems that spiral.
Fond of narrative loops, branching paths, and getting lost in a story.
SHADOWBOX
GAMES
Famously not game developers.
Games for people who love games, and for people who don't.
Come on inAbout the studio
Shadowbox Games began as a joke about a speedrunning exploit. It became a studio for exploring the absurdities of the workplace and the possibilities of puzzle-forward game design.
What we value
Games that unfold slowly: emotionally, narratively, and through layered interaction
Forms that feel like puzzles
Systems with something human hiding underneath
Branching stories with emotional weight
Above all, a love of the bit
Games
In development
An unnamed forthcoming project
The studio's next game is in the works. It doesn't have a public name yet.
Narrative, puzzle-forward, and about the systems people get stuck inside. More when there's something real to show.
Keep me postedInkPad
A browser editor for ink stories
InkPad is a free browser editor for writing interactive fiction and branching narrative in inkle's ink scripting language. Write with syntax highlighting, snippets, and live error checking. Play through your story in a built-in preview, watch variables change, and export a playable HTML file, ink source file, or compiled JSON.
It runs entirely in your browser and is 100% free and open source. We built it for our own work and share it with anyone writing interactive stories.
Behind the name
The studio is named after a speedrunning exploit: shoving a character into a box to slide past the game's boundaries.
noun
A container. A display case. A structure for something specific and strange.
verb
Or a fight with no opponent: just the form, practiced alone.
News
Launched the public beta of InkPad.
Puzzle development and narrative scripting for the next project.
Launched the Shadowbox website.
First internal playtests for the next project.
Say hello
Want to collaborate, ask something, or just say hi? Shadowbox likes meeting thoughtful people who like thoughtful things.
studio@shadowbox.games