The game did such a marvellous job of replicating - and even adding to - the atmosphere of the novel’s setting. Just like the novel, its language made you feel you were right there wandering the Night Circus through vivid imagery of sights, sounds and - especially - tastes and smells.
Just read through this list of sweets:
Caramel-drizzled Popcorn: Warm, soft and crunchy, it melts in the mouth. Cinnamon-Caramel Popcorn: Unusually delicious and rarely sold. Snow-Pale Porcelain Cup of Mint Tea: Steaming and delicious on a cold night. Vanilla Cream Bonbons: Like tiny, perfect snowballs nestling in their striped paper bag. Honey-Rose Dragées: Sugared, flavoured almonds in shades of cream and ivory. Crystallised White Violet: Whole and perfect, sparkling with sugar and softly scented, too beautiful to eat. Spiced Chocolates: Nutmeg, saffron, cloves, allspice, ginger. These truffles are intoxicating. Glass of Champagne: Soft and harsh, cold and sweet and sharp all at once. Peppermint Sugar Mouse: It would be a shame to bite its little head off. Coconut Ice: Pale as snow and delightfully crumbly. Chunk of Iced Gingerbread: Dark, sticky, glorious; torn from the roof of the Gingerbread House. Honeyed Cream and Chocolate Fudge: Sweet and buttery, melting and light and terribly, terribly moreish. Chocolate Bat: Impossibly delicate wings, these have, and liquorice for eyes.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve taken as many screenshots of the game as possible, like this one:
The Night Circus is one of my favourite novels, and I have many fond memories of this game and its beautiful imagery (although it would have been nice if you could draw & hold more than one card in your deck). I’m sad to see it go, along with Winterstrike, The Silver Tree, and the other Storynexus games.
Perhaps I shall visit Le Cirque des Rêves one more time before it departs.
I’ve been in touch with the Internet Archive about this, and they took some time to view the site. Unfortunately, they aren’t able to preserve it for us.
@ragnardegenhand Thanks for checking on this. It’s such a shame to see FBG’s older games disappearing, and this highlights the need for game preservation as older game engines lose support and live-service games are taken offline. We’ve already lost earlier FBG games such as Dragon Age: The Last Court and Machine Cares, and I’m saddened to see the StoryNexus games go as well.
I wonder if there’s any way to preserve the StoryNexus games in a playable format. I know that there have been some efforts at adapting the system, such as:
There seems to be a number of independent projects specializing in video game preservation, but nothing for text-based games. I wrote an email to some of the likeliest sites anyway, and also to the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge but so far, I’ve heard nothing back.
The game assets are a catch, though. It’s not clear that FBG can legally release those of their own decision, because they were authored by third parties. IP laws are weird and I don’t know if FBG can distribute the data under the same archival carve-outs that allow others to copy it.
Opening the hood of StoryNexus might be fraught with peril, since that’s what Fallen London still runs on. Plus there might be IP complications with that source code as well, if they used contractors or licensed code. The most promising angle might actually be to take a look at Sunless Sea; I’m given to understand the text narrative aspect of that uses a modified local version of StoryNexus, so it might be possible to sideload other stories as like a mod or something. But this is veeeeery theoretical.
Outside of being provided game data in database dumps, one might be able to recover a large chunk of the game functionality by using network-capture tools like Charles Proxy or Wireshark. Fallen London is fairly amenable to this. There are some aspects that aren’t seen, like hidden qualities and random rolls, but it would be a semi-automated way to capture large chunks of gameplay in a machine-readable format.
A different angle to preservation would be recording Let’s Play videos. I’ve never been a fan of the format but I could see the value. It’s a bit troublesome with the time limit on Actions though. I started playing Rat Sending Simulator but only got so far into it.
I wrote to FB about this at the beginning of the month and heard back from Adam (CEO). From his email, I gather an earlier effort was made to preserve StoryNexus, and there is correspondence that outlines the issues (which FB would have been willing to pass on to IA if they had been more optimistic.) That offer is presumably not limited to the Archive, so requesting that would be a possible step for any possible rescuer.
On the issue of copyright in the games written by third parties, it would be possible to put out a call to those still known and request their permission to archive the game(s). Make best efforts to track people down, in other words. (It is also possible, indeed likely, that FB had terms and conditions re. the copyright – that would have been wise, and their general willingness to have the site archived suggests they aren’t worried about any legal aspect.)
If there is no response, the works could be considered orphaned unless and until someone comes forward. It happens all the time with books. And, again with books, if someone does claim copyright, a takedown notice can be issued and the material removed. It sounds messy, I know. But it’s not as if these are grand projects that are set to make millions – they’re hobby projects their owners have lost interest in or lost track of.
As someone who feels very strongly about preserving the content on Story Nexus but is absolutely ignorant as to the technical and legal process: Is there any busywork a layperson can do to help with the issues?
Text based lets plays might work, even if video lets play isn’t an option (I’m thinking of how some tumblr’s originally archived Mr Eaten and Enigma content or how old Homestuck read along blogs used to work). Picking a game and either collecting print screens in a pdf or on a wikia format?
I’ve considered it a few times but my anti-virus throws a fit whenever I try to access the storynexus site and I’m not in a position where I could manage if this computer went wrong, so I’ve held off myself, but a more systematised version of what this thread is doing could probably preserve some of the stories by hyper linking printscreens etc.
Specifically for The Night Circus, the rights owner appears to be Random House (however, see below). From http://nightcircus.storynexus.com/ :
“Random House Group commissioned this award-winning game from Failbetter to celebrate and extend the novel. With Random House’s permission, we have kept the game alive here on StoryNexus so players can continue to enjoy it. The Night Circus is 100% free to play. All content remains the property of Random House, based on the characters and stories of Erin Morgenstern.”
For most of the other StoryNexus games in Polished status, the author is listed and is presumably the rights holder. For example, Winterstrike is by Yoon Ha Lee, and Below is by Chris Gardiner (“Though I work for Failbetter Games, Below is my personal project. Failbetter are devoid of all blame.”). Silver Tree is by FBG so there should be no rights issue there.
I have also found another example of a StoryNexus game revival project similar to the Dragon Age: The Last Court adaption. Black Crown was a significant StoryNexus project back in 2011-2013 before it was taken down in 2014. The files were later released and uploaded to GitHub by the author (Rob Sherman) for anyone who wanted to use them in a possible adaption. And indeed, an adaption titled “Black Crown: Exhumed” is in development for a Feb 2026 release at https://blackcrownexhumed.com/. This gives me hope for future preservation of The Night Circus and other StoryNexus games, if the game files can be released and made publicly available for future re-development the way Black Crown’s were.
Interestingly, in the Black Crown GitHub page the author notes that “The copyright was initially held by Random House itself, though it has since reverted in full to me.”, which makes me wonder about the rights status of The Night Circus game since it was also a Random House collaboration project.
@ IndomitableAlbatross - Thanks so much for sharing these files, particularly the Winterstrike screenshots.
Regarding preservation of the StoryNexus games, I think the key thing at this point is to see if FBG can release the game files & assets so that they can be made publicly available (e.g., on Github) so that anyone with an interest can work on adapting them for a future release on a different game engine.
@ragnardegenhand - can you share a bit more about what Adam said in his reply to you and what the issues are? I’m wondering if the IP right to The Night Circus (et al) are the hangup as @psgarak mentioned, or if it’s more related to preservation issues with the StoryNexus engine’s online aspects. If it’s just the latter, then hopefully FBG will be amenable to releasing the files for future fan development.
@phryne I just realised that I sort of hijacked your goodbye thread with the discussion about preserving The Night Circus. I’ve created a new thread here for anyone interested in continuing that discussion.
Of course. He didn’t go into detail, so what I reported above is pretty much it: He’s talking about the first response from the Internet Archive:
If they’d been more confident, it might plausibly have been worth forwarding the correspondence, but I don’t think there’s anything to be gained in the present circumstances; it’s not feasible for us to make StoryNexus games playable without login creation, or indeed, to fix the issues that have accumulated in the codebase since we stopped actively developing it more than ten years ago.
The thing to do now would be to request a copy of the correspondence, which presumably references the issues,
