Danse Macabre: An Efteling story is an horror game project based on the Efteling ride Danse Macabre. It was made to entice more thrill seekers to come to the park by making a story based game that ends where the story begins in the efteling. The development of this game started in February 2026 and ended in June 2026.
For this project I mostly worked as an artist since cuts meant that there was not enough time in this project for story design. The only story that was written for the game is a letter I wrote as an introduction to who the player is and what your mission is in the game. It was my first experience with writing in a fashion that would be accurate for the time period the game plays in which is 1880. It was a bit of a struggle to use older English but still write the latter in a way that can be understood by the average person. I think it went well and I learned more about the origin of modern English.
Danse Macabre
Seeing as this project was based on something with an already established story I did a lot of research into the story the Efteling had already written. I read the book that was especially written for the ride and took story elements and visuals which were used in the game, like the enemy in the last chase scene being a skeleton inspired by the fact that the worshippers of the big enemy, a demonic cat, turn into skeletons when they completed a ritual.
Doing this research thought me a lot on how important it is to do research on preexisting stories as it gives you a much bigger base to start from when writing. I also learnt a lot during this project about how you tell a story without using words which is something I would definitely want to improve upon in future projects.