My name is Sebastiano Serafini, and I’m the CEO and Founder of Serafini Productions – the team behind the BrokenLore universe. Today, we are very excited to announce the release of the latest addition to the BrokenLore series, BrokenLore: Don’t Lie. As well as being a standalone title, Don’t Lie is part of a larger narrative thread that shines a light on different perspectives of certain social issues.
BrokenLore: Don’t Lie is about a young hikikomori named Junko who must navigate her traumatic past before her reality slips from her grasp. For those unfamiliar, hikikomori are reclusive individuals who withdraw from social life, seeking isolation for a variety of social or psychological reasons.
As the boundaries between memory and reality begin to fracture due to Junko’s withdrawal from the outside world, familiar places transform into reflections of her past. Gradually, she must confront the people, experiences, and emotions she has spent years suppressing before she loses herself.
Junko and Shinji (The protagonist of Don’t Watch) met in a rehabilitation centre in the year 2020. They were both undergoing treatment for their different psychiatric disorders, which in turn led them to become hikikomori. Don’t Watch covers Shinji’s story, and the origins surrounding his own isolation.
The idea behind BrokenLore came from our desire to create an interconnected narrative universe that could explore different social issues that feel relevant to us.
I liked the idea of telling a fragmented story: each game can stand on its own and explore its own characters and themes, but players who are curious enough to look deeper can gradually connect those fragments.
From the beginning, we wanted BrokenLore to be more than just a series of horror games. Horror is the medium we use to tell these stories, but at the core of each game are very human experiences.
The topic of hikikomori was particularly interesting to me because I have lived in Japan for many years and have seen how social withdrawal is discussed and perceived here. Of course, isolation and social withdrawal are by no means exclusively Japanese issues, but Japan was the perspective through which I first became particularly interested in the subject.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/09/10/themes-explored-through-horror-in-brokenlore-dont-lie/
