Leaving Fallen London: How Failbetter Games spent several years growing hope and ‘discovering the art of the possible’ in their new eldritch farming sim

In the summer of 2021, Failbetter Games revealed Mandrake to me. The studio then revealed its next outing to the world at the PC Gaming Show 2025, a rural life sim where growing plants is a kind of forbidden magic.

It's post-apocalyptic, but instead of irradiated grey rocks, there's folkloric smallholding, and I learned about it over a video call, sitting on a kitchen chair. We weren't that long out of the UK's third and final COVID lockdown, and I wasn't prepared for mandatory working from home (post-apocalyptic, but instead of irradiated grey rocks there's neck pain).

In Mandrake you play a last scion returning to their old family homestead to relearn the ancient, lost ways of growing things. It takes place in a truly rural setting: an ancient forest that hides mysterious temples and a small community of NPCs. It's very different to the world of Sunless Skies, Failbetter's most famous works.

"It's inherently hopeful," says Adam Myers, Failbetter's CEO. "Whereas the world of Fallen London feels inherently cynical."

Myers is one of two people who first showed me Mandrake, the other being communications director Hannah Flynn. At the time, they were excited, I think, simply to show someone, and even then they had a few tentpoles in place. The cottage that is your tumbledown little home was there, but its design has changed a lot over the years. I have seen a version where the plots you till for plants curved with the landscape, for example, rather than sitting in an orderly grid, which made the whole thing feel like an Escher illustration. Hobb, the owl-like hearth spirit who lives in your chimney, also existed, in concept if not specific, strigine form.

When we spoke more recently, Myers wanted to emphasise that Failbetter hasn't been working on Mandrake exclusively this whole time. In fact, it has only recently become its main project.

Back in August of 2022 I talked to Stuart Young, the producer, who describes his job as being "a project manager, but for games". The plan then was to reveal Mandrake in 2023, before the slew of big summer announcements, and Young felt things were on track. The team was working towards an internal demo that would help scope out the game more clearly.

"Mandrake is quite ambitious in of the number of secondary systems—more so than Sunless Skies, certainly more so than Mask of the Rose," said Young at the time. This meant there were a lot of questions to answer before they were comfortable officially moving out of pre-production. As well as the central system of horticulture, there's also delving—Mandrakes sort-of equivalent to Stardew's mine exploration—and the story systems.

At the same time, the team had moved away from writing in StoryNexus to using Ink, and the goal was for the new universe of Mandrake to be as deep and rich as that of Fallen London, which had 10 years of work behind it. So, Young was having to factor in that the writers on Mandrake were, more than with any other game, "discovering the art of the possible."

In winter that year, just before Christmas, I checked in with Myers and Flynn again, and Myers explained that a large goal was for Failbetter to be able to work on Fallen London and two other things at once. “It's not really very comfortable yet,” he told me. “What we found in the time since [Sunless] Skies came out is that one of these things keeps being the thing that is the highest priority and steals resources and attention from the others.”

At the start, that project was Fallen London, which had its Mask of the Rose that landed in 2023. Both affected Mandrake’s pre-production.

It’s an obvious thing that probably bears repeating, but meeting people who make games underscores that games are made by people, with feelings.

In June 2023, I was invited to spend a couple of days at Failbetter's summer retreat, an annual trip where the fully remote team all meet somewhere on the edge of one of the UK's national parks. They visit historic sites of interest, eat local gingerbread, and go on hikes. The sort of holiday where, if you go far enough into the grass, you can believe that cars were never invented. Mandrake was inspired by a joke game prompt that said “eldritch gardener”, and it seems to lean more toward a kind of Clarke’s third law of horticulture, and views gardening as kind of inherently magical. The game does feature outlandish plants that do more literally magical things, but also crop rotation and soil quality, which don’t feel un-arcane to me in real life, and I live next door to a farm.

Still, despite—or maybe because of—the mystical qualities of the English countryside, Failbetter’s retreat was a working holiday. Mask of the Rose had released, and though the reception was was more muted than the team had perhaps hoped. One day of the retreat was given over to a Mask of the Rose retrospective, and I was politely banned from the house, as things were expected to get a little raw. Being around developers in that moment was like meeting someone just after they pressed send on a resignation email. There was some sadness from saying goodbye, but mixed with some tiredness and the kind of relief you get when you stand up after a long time sitting. It’s an obvious thing that probably bears repeating, but meeting people who make games underscores that games are made by people, with feelings.

There was excitement about the future, too, even though Mandrake had shot past that tentative 2023 reveal date. The Mandrake presentations I was privy to were upbeat, but still very early prototypes, and it felt like Failbetter had started to think much more seriously about Mandrake during that summer period. The project would need more writers, I was told. They’d estimated that if the narrative director Chris Gardiner were working alone, the writing in Mandrake represented “nine Chris years” of work.

Erion Makuo, a contracting artist, had been brought on full time, relocating from Siberia. Their character designs were influencing the written content: Erion had drawn Nessa the smith with tattoos on one arm, leading to the lore tidbit that she smithed magical things with that arm and mundane things with the other. “I write a few bullet points and send them off,” said Gardiner, explaining his own input on character design, “but the number of bullet points has gone down since Erion ed.”

The thing that was constantly mentioned about NPCs, from the first meeting I had with Failbetter to the last, was cauliflower. Myers always wanted to emphasise that socialising with NPCs would not work on the standard videogame-y basis. “That is how you woo your wife sometimes in like farming Sims, right?” he said. “You find the vegetable they like and you give it to them a lot.”

But what if they don't like cauliflower? Have they expressed a need for any? Wouldn't it be weird to give someone loads of cauliflower at all? The poor brassica became a shorthand: relationships are not entirely transactional. They spent a lot of time thinking about different ways to quantify the complex things about giving gifts in real life, one possible option mooted being that players give an express reason or intent when presenting said gift, vegetable or otherwise.

NPCs in Mandrake dress in clothes and live in homes that represent their role in Chandley, and who they are. Rosen, for example, keeps bees and loves children, and is what Flynn described as “a wonderfully big fat woman who is in charge of the whole village, and isn’t a villain or a chef.” Her home has a large, open plan living room with a long table. In one corner a wall has little stick figures drawn in coloured chalk, about the height a crouching child would draw them.

By May of 2024, Myers and Flynn were able to show me Rosen in the internal demo in Unity, which still had large swathes of untextured grey. Myers showed me how to plant turnips (“We don’t have potatoes,” he said, “because they’re New World crops.”). They had tested artwork for different seasons, my favourite being the toffee-kissed colours of autumn. Important conversations now had a UI in a column on the right side, inspired by Disco Elysium (other influences on Mandrake include local wildflower gardens, myths local to just one town, and, per Gardiner, The Gilmore Girls). At this showing, the game had a more recognisably gamey shape. Flynn said it was like they’d had a garage full of parts and now they had a car, even if it wouldn’t start yet; Myers compared it to being a parent who buys a new set of clothes for a child, and is still somehow surprised every time to see how much they’d grown.

In the summer of 2025 Gardiner told me that the stakes in Mandrake had to be personal. In Fallen London you can spice things up with a boxing match, say, and describe it in text, but Mandrake would need the ring as a visual asset. Mandrake’s story is told through conversations with NPCs, which means the characters have to be well-developed little people. “These aren't stakes like in Sunless Skies, where we can have a sun consumed by spiders or anything” he said. “It has to be things that matter to these characters.”

Chandley and the land around it also operate under more than one Covenant, a sort of contract with the world itself. One is the reason that horticulture is rare magic; another means that the land is safe for people by day, but not at night. You can’t actually die in Mandrake, but it’s a world that isn’t ruled by humans anymore, and even if it were, so what? “These characters to feel like real people, and real people have had kind of tragedy in their past or face tragedy in their daily lives or in their present,” said Gardiner.

The world is also scattered with beings like the Yolf, a big and distressingly hairy beast who informs you that an ancestor of yours owed him a large sum of money, and that debt is now yours (in the demo I attempted to suggest an alternate arrangement, and was told, “The Yolf prefers cash.”). There’s Granny Jakes, who offers you a potentially terrible exchange that I won’t spoil. These folkloric demi-gods aren’t necessarily hostile so much as they are indifferent to you. Not only is food limited, but technology too, with one NPC’s job being to repair old machines because new ones can’t be made.

Though Mandrake has a slightly different voice to Fallen London, which Gardiner described as “opinionated and cynical”, there is commonality. “We're not going to write a game that basically says, ‘everything would be nice if only everyone was nice’. I don’t believe that,” said Gardiner. Myers said some of his favourite writing in Mandrake is where they’ve managed to create a greater level of personal intimacy than in their previous games, but it’s not always warm. “What if you need to break the news to a being that has a very limited grasp of human mortality, that the reason they haven't seen a close friend in many years is that that friend has now ed on?” he said.

This is what I think they mean when they say Mandrake is more hopeful. It is literally and metaphorically about growing. It’s about having to live in a real community, with all the difficulty that can actually entail.

On their retreats Failbetter stay in large, old houses or converted farm buildings rather than hotels. They divide up laying and clearing the table, serving food, they play complex board games, they have little squabbles sometimes or go on walks together, they bottles of wine, they do the drying after washing up.

In our last meeting Flynn, Myers and Gardiner were excited, they were smiling and energised. I asked what revealing Mandrake means to them—a game divorced from their old work, this wholly new thing. There was a pause. “That’s hard to say, I think,” said Flynn.

Now, with Mandrake finally unveiled to the world, what it means will likely evolve over time.