Pennyfold Wishlist on Steam

A hand-painted puzzle game from Teacup Pines

Fold the page. Mend the story.

Marrowby's pages have been shuffled. You are Wren, the lamplighter's apprentice, folding, turning and stitching them back into a story.

Wishlist on Steam See the chapters

Releasing 12 March 2027 Steam for Windows and macOS Nintendo Switch No timers, no fail states

The story

A town whose book came unbound

Marrowby was written down once, long ago, and it has lived inside that book ever since. One autumn night the binding gave out. Now the baker wakes up on the harbour page, the tide comes in over the orchard, and the clocktower strikes hours that have not happened yet.

Wren is not a hero. She is fourteen, she carries a lantern that is slightly too heavy for her, and she is the only person in town who can still see the creases. Each chapter hands her a bundle of loose pages. Fold them the right way and a road meets its bridge; turn them and a window faces the moon again; stitch two pages together and a lost neighbour walks home.

There is no clock and nothing to lose. If a page will not sit right, Wren sets it down, has a cup of tea, and you try again with a clearer head.

How it plays

Three verbs, and a whole town to put right

Every puzzle is a real sheet of painted paper with rules you can feel in your hands. Nothing is hidden behind a menu; if you can see the crease, you can use it.

One. Fold

Bring far things near

Crease a page along any painted line and the two halves meet. A river on the left edge folds over to reach the mill on the right. Fold twice and a whole valley disappears into a pocket.

Two. Turn

Face the other way

Some pages are pinned at a corner and swing like a gate. Turn the harbour page a quarter and the lighthouse points inland; turn the sky and the moon rises over a different street. Light and shadow move with it.

Three. Stitch

Sew two pages into one

Hold two edges together and run a thread along them. Once stitched, the pages behave as one sheet, so a fold on the orchard now pulls the market square with it. Undo the seam whenever you like; the thread never runs out.

Five chapters, 112 pages

Marrowby, one district at a time

Chapter one18 pages

The Orchard Rows

Wren learns to fold. The apple rows have been shuffled so the harvest cart cannot reach the press, and every tree remembers where it used to stand.

Chapter two22 pages

Tidewell Harbour

The sea page has slid over the town. Turn the harbour so the tide runs back out, and find where the ferryman's boat has been folded away.

Chapter three26 pages

The Paper Woods

Stitching arrives. The wood is a stack of pages layered too deep to see through, and the woodcutter's daughter is somewhere in the middle of it.

Chapter four24 pages

The Clocktower

Pages from different hours have been bound together. Fold the tower so that noon sits beside noon, and the bell can finally strike the right day.

Chapter five22 pages

The Long Night

Every district at once. The whole book is open on the table and the binding has to be sewn back before the lanterns burn down.

Painted by hand

Gouache, scanned, and not a pixel smoothed over

Every page in the game is a real sheet of paper that sat on Ida's desk.

We paint each district at twice the size it appears on screen, scan it on a flatbed that has seen better days, and cut the pages out by hand so the edges keep their fibres. When you fold a page in Pennyfold, the crease you see is a photographed crease from the same sheet.

1,860 painted tiles

Hills, roofs, tide lines and the backs of pages, each painted once and never mirrored.

41 minutes of score

Harp, clarinet and a slightly out-of-tune upright piano, recorded in June's front room.

Eleven pigments, no more

The whole town is mixed from one small tin. That is why the night in chapter five still looks like the noon of chapter one.

0 timers

Nothing counts down and nothing resets. Put the controller down for a month and Marrowby waits.

The studio

Teacup Pines is three people in a room above a bakery

We are a small studio in Bristol, England. We started in 2021 with a shared laptop and a rule that nothing goes in the game unless one of us painted, wrote or played it first.

Pennyfold is our second game and the first one big enough to need a table. It has taken three years, two flatbed scanners and roughly four hundred cups of tea. We are publishing it ourselves, which means the release date on this page is ours to keep.

Sootling (2022)

A ninety-minute game about a chimney spirit finding its way home. Free on itch, still played more than we expected.

Ida Halvorsen

Art and direction. Paints every page, names every cat in Marrowby, refuses to use a ruler.

Tomas Reyes

Code and puzzle design. Wrote the paper simulation twice, then a third time so it would run on Switch.

June Okafor

Music and sound. Recorded the tide with a microphone in a bucket. It worked.

Biscuit

Studio dog. Responsible for the sound the lantern makes when you set it down.

Wishlist now

Marrowby opens on 12 March 2027

A wishlist is the single thing that helps a small studio most on launch day. If Pennyfold looks like your kind of evening, add it and we will send one email when it is out.

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