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Building the reality we can live with
Dec. 30th, 2025 05:39 pmNormally Estival is the highlight of my Fallen London year. It's an annual event held in the northern hemisphere summer, and unlike the other regular festivals, it's a unique storyline every time. This year was the fifth one:
2021
2022
2023
2024
I haven't had as much time this year to play Fallen London, and I'm behind with some of the major storylines like Firmament. But I was still keen to take part in Estival, and I just hoped the scavenger hunt didn't require access to areas I hadn't unlocked.
For more details, including a day-by-day recap of events:
Timeline of events (on the wiki)
Gameplay guide (on the wiki)
Estival: Hell is Missing (official promo post)
It was a lot more experimental this year, and I didn't really get as hyped about it. It started off wild and interesting, with your character waking up to find the laws of reality have started going out of control. But after that initial fun exploration, things got a lot harder and less appealing.
On a mechanical level, some of the puzzles were so difficult or obscure, they felt impossible to solve unless you burned up a lot of actions trying different things. Though apparently, if you were on the Discord solving them together with other players, it was a good time.
Normally I'm fine with lagging behind the early adopters, and being guided by hints or even looking up solutions. But there's still a feeling of logic and choice. This time, it felt like I was glued to a walkthrough, jumping through arbitrary hoops to get a desired result.
There were also time limits on some stages, which meant if you took too long getting to that stage, it wasn't available anymore. For example, I missed out on doing the quest for the Book of All Hours, because I wanted to complete the quest for Pinning Down the Corners instead of skipping that activity.
And on a story level, it didn't really seize my imagination or get me deeply invested, the way past Estivals have. The emotional core of the story was about the Bishop of Southwark, one of the veterans of the war of 1868, and his survivor's guilt about his fellow soldiers who were imprisoned by Hell. And the plot climax of the story was when we were able to free those prisoners - sort of - by carving out a bubble of reality for them as their enclave, outside of the reach of Hell but also apart from the rest of the Neath. So a kind of bittersweet ending.
But more than that, even though I'm sure it was cathartic for Southwark, it felt like we were experiencing that catharsis secondhand. I don't know why freeing the prisoners from the Sixth Coil felt so emotional, and freeing the prisoners from Hell didn't.
There were things I enjoyed. I liked searching for the Urchins disguised as the Masters. I liked meeting Milton the Devil. I liked visiting the tutorial version of New Newgate Prison again. I liked the new activities of hunting rogue laws and forging new laws. I liked taking on the challenge of getting Scathless the hard way. But overall, it didn't hit the heights for me that past years have. But maybe that's too much to ask for every time.
Further discussion:
HELL IS MISSING had potential, but the execution was a mess
Thoughts on this year's Estival?
Failbetter Games has announced:
It's obviously a lot of work to put together a brand new Estival every year, and have to meet the high expectations for the event, and manage the pace of player progress in real time. And you don't want to burn out. So a break sounds like a good idea.
(Of course the playerbase is like, "But this is what they would say if it was a fake out!")
2021
2022
2023
2024
I haven't had as much time this year to play Fallen London, and I'm behind with some of the major storylines like Firmament. But I was still keen to take part in Estival, and I just hoped the scavenger hunt didn't require access to areas I hadn't unlocked.
For more details, including a day-by-day recap of events:
Timeline of events (on the wiki)
Gameplay guide (on the wiki)
Estival: Hell is Missing (official promo post)
It was a lot more experimental this year, and I didn't really get as hyped about it. It started off wild and interesting, with your character waking up to find the laws of reality have started going out of control. But after that initial fun exploration, things got a lot harder and less appealing.
On a mechanical level, some of the puzzles were so difficult or obscure, they felt impossible to solve unless you burned up a lot of actions trying different things. Though apparently, if you were on the Discord solving them together with other players, it was a good time.
Normally I'm fine with lagging behind the early adopters, and being guided by hints or even looking up solutions. But there's still a feeling of logic and choice. This time, it felt like I was glued to a walkthrough, jumping through arbitrary hoops to get a desired result.
There were also time limits on some stages, which meant if you took too long getting to that stage, it wasn't available anymore. For example, I missed out on doing the quest for the Book of All Hours, because I wanted to complete the quest for Pinning Down the Corners instead of skipping that activity.
And on a story level, it didn't really seize my imagination or get me deeply invested, the way past Estivals have. The emotional core of the story was about the Bishop of Southwark, one of the veterans of the war of 1868, and his survivor's guilt about his fellow soldiers who were imprisoned by Hell. And the plot climax of the story was when we were able to free those prisoners - sort of - by carving out a bubble of reality for them as their enclave, outside of the reach of Hell but also apart from the rest of the Neath. So a kind of bittersweet ending.
But more than that, even though I'm sure it was cathartic for Southwark, it felt like we were experiencing that catharsis secondhand. I don't know why freeing the prisoners from the Sixth Coil felt so emotional, and freeing the prisoners from Hell didn't.
There were things I enjoyed. I liked searching for the Urchins disguised as the Masters. I liked meeting Milton the Devil. I liked visiting the tutorial version of New Newgate Prison again. I liked the new activities of hunting rogue laws and forging new laws. I liked taking on the challenge of getting Scathless the hard way. But overall, it didn't hit the heights for me that past years have. But maybe that's too much to ask for every time.
Further discussion:
HELL IS MISSING had potential, but the execution was a mess
Thoughts on this year's Estival?
Failbetter Games has announced:
We're taking a break from Estival in 2026.
You'll be able to get Estival tokens and to spend them, and we may include a few other things as well. But there'll be no big overarching storyline. And given the nature of Estival, it seems right to emphasise – we're not being coy, and this isn't a fake out. There will be no falling stalactite. No broken law engines. The citizens of London will not need to come together to fend off some surprising threat to their fair city. For we have looked upon our spreadsheets, and reluctantly accepted that next year we cannot do everything we might wish in Fallen London while making adequate progress on Mandrake, which we're working to bring to Early Access.
It's obviously a lot of work to put together a brand new Estival every year, and have to meet the high expectations for the event, and manage the pace of player progress in real time. And you don't want to burn out. So a break sounds like a good idea.
(Of course the playerbase is like, "But this is what they would say if it was a fake out!")
