Mladen Bošnjak, Founder of Misfit Village Talks Go Home Annie – Interview Series

Listen up, SCP fans — developer Misfit Village has quite the concoction of nightmarish shenanigans up its sleeve—a melting pot of ingredients that will reportedly mesh a wealth of psychological effects with a vast array of puzzles, anomalies, and a new storyline to explore. The game, aptly titled Go Home Annie, will launch on PC on December 3, 2024.

In a bid to learn more about Go Home Annie, I recently caught up with Misfit Village Founder and Creative Director, Mladen Bošnjak, who kindly filled me in on all of the latest developments.

Go Home Annie has certainly kept us on tenterhooks since its initial announcement, and we’re itching to see more of it! Before we delve into the details, though, mind if we start from the beginning? What is Go Home Annie, in a nutshell?

Mladen: Go Home Annie is a twisted psychological thriller and an original story set in the SCP universe. You’ll be testing SCPs, solving puzzles, interacting with anomalies and getting entangled into a mystery that needs solving.

I think I speak for everyone in the gaming community when I say this: Misfit Village — you had us at SCP. I suppose, what we would like to know is, what inspired you to plant roots in this collaborative archipelago, in particular?

Mladen: I was fascinated with the SCP Foundation as soon as I first heard of it through Fredrik Knudsen’s Down The Rabbit Hole YouTube series. I’d already had a few gameplay ideas that would be perfect SCPs and the premise of “the whole haunted house prologue of the game is fake, you’re actually in controlled conditions doing a test you’ve done over a hundred times” fit right in. I wanted to give my contribution to the SCP lore and since I make video games I thought that would be the perfect vehicle to tell my story. Awesome teammates, a successful demo and a publisher later, and we have a game releasing next month!

Sure enough, Go Home Annie will be thrusting us into the underbelly of the SCP Foundation, and we’re all for it. With that said, we would love to know more about our role in this world. Who are we filling the boots of, and how exactly do we tie into this ever-evolving tapestry of psychological abnormalities?

Mladen: The protagonist whose shoes you’ll be filling is Annie. She is a D-Class tester in the SCP world, the lowest rank you can have in the Foundation. In most SCP stories D-Class are taken from death row, but since you can do what you want with the SCP lore (everything is cannon, there is no main canon) we changed that up a bit. Annie is not a death row inmate. She did do something pretty bad to end up where she ended up, though.

Annie’s been testing the same SCPs for months and months (maybe even years). But on the night the game’s story happens, things are set in motion which irreversibly change her routine forever.

Let’s talk about the creatures and other monstrosities that’ll feature in Go Home Annie. Will there be a primary antagonist in this story, or will it include an array of anomalies, all as equally sinister as the other?

Mladen: There will be multiple hurdles for Annie to go through for her to understand her role in the SCP Foundation and why she’s potentially not what she thinks she is. Some of those hurdles will come in the form of anomalies and antagonists. Others will be more complicated. Creatures which seem like they’ll kill you might turn out to be friends and people who you’d never think would be antagonists might turn out to be just that.

You’ve mentioned that fans who frequent the SCP sphere will find plenty to love in Go Home Annie. Would you mind elaborating on this? What sorts of familiar “gems” await us in this new world?

Mladen: I can list off some of the SCPs that we’ve already shown in promo materials such as the Not Deer (SCP-6448), The Clockworks (SCP-914) and The Debating Tub (SCP-1974). Yes, you’ll be talking to a bathtub in Go Home Annie. Besides those there’s more that you’ll be interacting with directly, even more that are just around as props and even more than that that are just alluded to. Wherever you see three or four numbers together in Go Home Annie, there’s a 95% chance if you google those numbers with “SCP” in front of them, you’ll find an SCP we’re alluding to in that place.

Please could you tell us a bit more about the challenges, puzzles, and other curveballs that we’ll be dealing with in Go Home Annie?

Mladen: The first major gameplay element in the game is the handheld camera through which players can see objects that are not in the real world and try to bring them back based on tapes they find throughout the prologue. After that the puzzles start integrating with existing SCPs like SCP-914 where you need to create “rough” and “fine” versions of various objects. As the game progresses the puzzles get weirder to the point where you need to rotate whole rooms around you and travel through two parallel worlds to solve them.

Go Home Annie coming December 3rd 2024.#SCPFoundation #horrorgaming pic.twitter.com/2qXxpIpchx

— Misfit Village | Go Home Annie (@MisfitVillage) October 29, 2024

We have to ask while the iron’s still hot — what is the “secret” to succeeding in Go Home Annie? Mind sharing a few quick pointers with those who might be interested in picking up a copy of the game on launch day?

Mladen: Look for audio and visual cues such as the noise getting stronger on your handheld camera and lighting in the game guiding you towards puzzle solutions.

With SCP being the bottomless barrel that it is, it seems that there’s more than enough room to expand a little further in future projects. Would you consider revisiting the SCP Foundation for another tale, or is it too early to call it?

Mladen: I would love to create future stories and experiences in the SCP universe. Everything depends on the potential success of Go Home Annie. There’s so many interesting SCPs we’d like to play with. In Go Home Annie we’ve also only touched upon the various factions other than the Foundation in the SCP universe. The potential is limitless.

So, how can we stay up to date with Go Home Annie and all things Misfit Village? Are we able to share any social channels, newsletters, or upcoming event details with our readers?

Mladen: Sure! Here’s our Twitter/X, Facebook page, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Discord. Our Discord members get behind the scenes footage and can talk to us directly. I’m pretty open to discussing anything there. To the point where my teammates need to shut me up sometimes so I don’t spoil the game.

Would you like to add anything to the page before we wrap things up over here?

Mladen: Go Home Annie is coming out December 3rd of this year. That’s less than a month away! We’ll be sharing a final trailer before release. Wishlist the game on Steam, GOG and Epic Games Store to get a notification on release so you don’t forget to buy it. Cheers!

Thanks for your time, Mladen! Best of luck with the upcoming launch!

You can find more information on Misfit Village’s Go Home Annie by following the official X channel here. You can also add the game to your wishlist on Steam for additional pre-launch coverage here.