Games Like Ghostwriter

YOU WRITE THE SONGS. SHE GETS THE FAME.

You're Adam Palmer, a ghostwriter hired by Velvet Frame Records to write five songs for rising dark-pop star Zoe Ell.

Charlie Lennox, the label's founder, has a rule: "Talent means nothing without direction." Zoe knows what the next hit needs to feel like.

They don't always want the same song. Your job is to satisfy both.

No one outside the project can know where the words came from.

SHAPE WHAT THE SONG MEANS

Listen to Zoe and Charlie. Review session recordings. Dig through Velvet Frame's archives.

A phrase Zoe drops between takes.

A line buried in an old file.

A private note of your own.

Choose what makes it into the song, then build it section by section: verse, chorus, bridge. Research costs time, so eventually you have to work with what you've found.

The same track can become a clean hit, bury what really happened, or push dangerously close to the truth.

Every source can make the song stronger. Some make the truth harder to hide.

RELEASE IT TO THE WORLD

Hear Zoe perform the finished song, then watch the world react.

Fans quote the lyrics and search them for meaning. Zoe has to live with what they say in her voice. Charlie turns the response into new demands for the next track.

Every release changes the pressure on the next.

DIG BENEATH THE HITS

The deeper you search, the stranger the archive becomes.

Some phrases are older than the songs they appear in. Familiar lines turn up where they shouldn't. Files don't always match the story you've been told.

Follow the traces before your own private words become just another part of the archive.

FIVE SONGS. MULTIPLE ENDINGS. ONE VOICE TOO MANY.