What it is
Perpetūra is a free interactive novel: five interconnected stories, each set in a different era, each following a woman who carries a feeling she has never found the words for. It reads as prose first. Character art and illustrated scenes come along the way, but the words carry the story, and there are no stat screens.
Every story branches into three to five routes, mostly different ways of coming to know one of the people around her, and always one solo path where she chooses herself instead. That path is written as a full resolution, not a lesser one. A codex fills in as you read across all five stories: people, places and the details that do not quite add up yet, and each finished story unlocks its own theme song from an original score written for it. All five stories are complete and live now, playable for free in the browser, with no install and no account required.
Watch
A walkthrough of how it reads, and a trailer for each volume and story.
Watch / Walkthrough
Watch / Book One1 / 4
Read it as a book
The five stories are also published as two Kindle ebooks. Each volume takes one route through each story and reads straight through, so there are no choices to make and nothing to unlock. If you would rather turn pages than turn an orrery, that is what these are for.
Book One, The Ones Before, holds Hyunjae in Joseon Korea, Reine in Belle Époque Paris, and Liuyan on the Tang Dynasty Silk Road. It came out on 18 September 2026. Book Two, The Origin, carries the pattern back to where it started. It followed a week later, on 25 September 2026.
The interactive version stays free. Nothing in these books is held back from the browser, and nothing in the browser costs anything. The ebooks are for readers who want the stories in one line, on a device that goes in a pocket.
Where it came from
I have been playing otome games for years: the Code:Realize series, Hakuoki, Amnesia, Collar x Malice, Mystic Messenger, Dandelion. What kept me coming back was the way a route makes you learn a person slowly, and how someone you were certain about in the first hour can leave you feeling something completely different by the end. That is the effect I wanted to be able to produce myself, across five women rather than one.
The centuries came from what I watch. Korean historical drama first, far more of it than I could count, though Empress Ki, Iljimae, Queen Woo, Alchemy of Souls and Dear Hongrang are among the ones I keep going back to. Chinese costume drama has taken over more recently, again more titles than I could sensibly list, though I would hand someone Love Between Fairy and Devil, Till the End of the Moon, The Double, Blossom or Back from the Brink first. Add Paris in its golden years, which I have loved for as long as I can remember, and you have most of the map. Those were the rooms I already wanted to spend time in, so those are the eras the stories went to.
What I wanted most was to write women who are genuinely capable and still short of the one thing they have been looking for their whole lives. Each of them is excellent at something, and each of them carries an imperfection that being excellent does not cover. That gap is the part I find relatable, and it is why none of them is written as a woman with a problem she can simply state.
The last wish was a world where stories connect. The title screen holds an orrery you turn to move between the five stories, and a separate chart, the Atlas, lays out how the women's lives touch one another once you have read enough to see it. Both exist because I wanted those connections to be something a reader can look at and turn, rather than something a paragraph explains to them.
How it is built
Perpetūra is hand-built: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript underneath, no game engine and no framework. It runs entirely in the browser, saves live on the reader's own device, and the site sets no tracking cookies and collects no personal data. A few settings exist purely for comfort, among them adjustable reading speed and a full reduce-motion mode for anyone who would rather every screen stayed still. Perpetūra is designed and maintained by one person.
Perpetūra keeps its own Instagram at @playperpetura, where the art and the small updates go. The studio's other work is on @lacunaedesigns.
In conversation
In October 2026 I spent an hour and a half talking with Lupe Farkas on her podcast, Imperfect Rebel. We began with how Perpetūra came to be and wandered a long way from there.
Listen
Every story closes on a theme song of its own, which the game unlocks when you finish it. I write the lyrics. All eight are out as Perpetūra Original Soundtracks.