Hello everyone. It’s been a while so here’s a little clue into what’s been happening. No, the game's not dead. I'm just horrible at posting updates, and yes, taking my sweet, sweet time. Progress has been progressing slowly. There was an upgrade to some of the core software that I use that, frankly, I screwed up and lost a lot of the writing/logic progress of BEW2 but not renders. It kicked things back a month or two, but in the long time that I’ve taken with getting this out, it’s just a drop in the bucket, right?
One of the main things I’ve been trying to do with this remake is to level up the quality of the writing. At the heart, BEW has always been intended as a visual novel. Sure, there are a lot of choices and branches, but the story has been king. At least, that’s what I wanted. Getting better at writing has been both fun and difficult. Mostly, it’s been time consuming. In a way, losing a lot of the story work that I had done with the upgrade earlier this year was a blessing in disguise. I wrote myself into a lot of traps that I wasn’t even aware of until I started trying to recreate things.
Something I’ve always done, or thought that I’d done, was to write every major POV. Not just the player POV, but also Emily, Jasmine, Faith, Natalie, etc… Looking back at my original efforts in doing this is a bit laughable, but my skills have improved. I hope.
I will begin by writing the scene as if it’s in a novel, but with less imagery than a novel would have. That’s covered by the “visual” part of the visual novel. Instead, I focus more on the headspace of the characters. I write Brad’s POV using whimsical “you” to pull the player in as if they are experiencing it. I write other POV’s in the first person. Later I transform Brad’s POV to a better format for the game, simplifying it.
One aspect that I’m building into the remake of the game is to expose those alternate POV’s. As the player, after certain criteria are met (still TBD) you will have the ability to view a replay of the save using the same images and the exact path chosen but displaying alternate text that is the selected woman’s point of view.
To bring this all together, I thought I would share a snippet of the Bar scene. This shouldn’t be a spoiler for anyone who’s played the original game. There’s a part of the scene where Emily has her breakdown and Brad moves her to the booth. Here are the three POV’s for that section of the story which has been extended in BEW2, Brad’s POV with the player as Brad, Emily’s POV, and finally Faith’s POV. These are drafts, and certainly have continuity errors, were written on different days, blah blah. It's an example of how that section of the scene is seen through each character's eyes along one path. This is the pure, raw story that will be transformed into the game format.
I hope you all enjoy the peek behind the scenes.
Brad’s/Player’s POV
Emily's sobs aren't just shaking her — they're rattling straight through you. You catch her around the waist, forearm tight against her stomach, the other braced near her hip to guide her.
"Come here," you whisper, though you're not sure if she hears you over her own breathing. You ease her off the stool, keeping her turned against you so she doesn't have to stand on her own. Her hands stay clamped to her face, elbows tucked in, as if she can hold everything in by sheer force.
Somewhere just outside the small tunnel of focus you have on her, Faith's voice finds you.
"Take her to the booth. It's darker — quieter."
You don't look to see what she's doing. Your eyes are on Emily, your arms gathering her in and steering her in the direction Faith's voice came from. Her weight sags into you with every step, her head bowed, hands still covering her face. The broken sound of her breathing fills the space between you.
The room blurs at the edges as you move — the muffled scrape of a chair somewhere, the faint clink of glasses — but none of it touches what's happening in your arms.
When you reach the booth, you slide in first, pulling her with you without breaking the circle of your arms. She settles between your legs, her back folding into your chest. You wrap her midsection again, one hand finding the other at her front, holding steady. She stays curled forward, head in her hands, sobs stumbling over each other until they come in sharp bursts.
You bend, pressing your cheek into her hair, letting your breath move slow and even in case it might steady hers by proximity. Your chest moves with hers — a counterweight, maybe, or just something to lean against while she comes apart.
The heat from before feels like it belongs to someone else, from another lifetime an hour earlier. Right now there's only this — the clutch of your arms, the damp warmth of breath against her skin, the silent promise you keep making without words: You don't have to lift your head until you want to.
Emily’s POV
Once the dam broke, there was no pulling it back. The sobs come too hard, too jagged — each one stealing air before I can catch it back. My palms are locked over my face, trying to hold my skull together, trying to keep the pieces from spilling all over the floor.
Then his voice — low, steady, “Come here” — seeps in through the roar. His arm loops across my stomach, solid and sure, pulling me gently off the stool. My feet find the floor, but there’s nothing under me except the frame of him behind me, moving me forward.
I can’t pull my hands away. I don’t want anyone to see me like this — not the strangers at the bar, not him. Especially not him. The shame pushes up alongside the grief, tangling tighter: shame for falling apart here, for making a scene, for dragging him into my storm when he didn’t ask to be in it.
Faith’s voice cuts through from somewhere else:
“Take her to the booth. It’s darker — quieter.”
I don’t lift my head, don’t look to see her face. I can't.
Every step is an echo of the last few weeks — the silence after Eddie walked away, the pathetic sound of my own voice calling his name and getting nothing back. The jagged humiliation of re‑living old conversations, wondering where I’d said too much, or too little. The certainty that I wasn’t enough to keep him, no matter how I tried. That final look he gave me — polite, closed, already gone — has been replaying in my mind for hours, and now it’s layering itself over this moment, spiking the sobs until I’m gasping.
I can’t separate this breakdown from that failure; it all spins together, building speed. This isn’t just tonight. It’s every “not enough” I’ve ever been handed, condensed into one unrelenting undertow.
The world around me fades to meaningless noise — a scrape, a clink — as his arms steer me. The shame insists they’re all watching, judging, that Brad is silently regretting ever getting involved. The fact that he hasn’t let go yet doesn’t fit the narrative in my head, so it gets shoved aside, buried under the tide of certainty that I’m nothing but a burden.
We reach the booth. He sits and pulls me with him, folding me between his legs, my spine sinking back into his chest. His arms lock around me again, one over the other, holding steady. My head stays forward in my hands, the darkness behind my eyelids safer than any eye contact could be.
The sobs keep coming, fed by the loop — Eddie’s voice, Eddie’s absence, my mistakes, my imagined failings, my very presence here ruining someone else’s night. I can’t stop tracing the endless chain of where I went wrong, how I broke what we had, why I was so easy to leave.
Underneath it all, dim as light at the bottom of deep water, is the strength of him around me. His cheek in my hair, his breathing a slow, steady counterpoint to my own chaos. I can just barely feel it, like fingers brushing mine in the dark — not enough to lift me out, but enough to remind me there’s still something to hold on to, if I can keep my grip.
For now, I can’t lift my head. All I can do is cling to that barely perceptible rope and hope it holds against the current.
Faith’s POV
The moment Brad hooked an arm across Emily’s waist and pulled her down from the stool, I knew the air between them had shifted from heat to something far heavier. Emily’s head stayed buried in her hands, shoulders trembling hard enough I could see the aftershocks from where I stood.
“Take her to the booth,” I called, already moving. “It’s darker — quieter.”
I was halfway to the booth before they even began to cross the floor, brushing crumbs from the table, gathering the menus, angling the small lamp so shadow would fall over most of the seat. The few customers still nursing their drinks wouldn’t have much to see — I intended to make sure of it.
I caught a glimpse of Brad steering Emily, his arms still locked around her midsection, guiding her in small, patient steps. She didn’t lift her face, just let herself be moved, her elbows drawn in tight like she was protecting her own center from collapsing completely.
That posture — the fold, the way her whole frame seemed to compress around grief — was familiar. I’d been there, though my own collapses had come after short, sharp endings, not the wreckage of something that had lasted. I knew the taste of rejection. I didn’t know the full weight of losing someone who’d had time to become a habit, a history.
They reached the booth. Brad slid in first, pulling her with him so she ended up tucked between his legs, back to his chest. His arms wrapped across her again, making a barrier nothing could breach unless he let it.
I lingered a beat to make sure the sightlines from the rest of the bar were useless, then peeled away toward the counter. The ice bin needed topping up. A couple at the far table signaled for another round, so I drew their beers slow, foam thick enough to slow conversation.
As I worked, I let my eyes flick to the front door. Slow night. No one new walking in. I sent Samantha home, my hand found the light switch for the neon sign — click — the glow outside blinked away. The “Open” sign followed, flipped to “Closed” without ceremony. A mental note to lock up early; no reason to keep the room lit for strangers when the most important thing happening tonight was over there in the booth.
Between serving, wiping, and stacking glasses, I kept a corner of my awareness on them. From this angle, all I could see was the curve of Brad’s shoulder around her, the slope of her head still bowed into her hands. Whatever they were saying, if anything, was too quiet to carry. Which was the point.
The rest of the world could wait until she decided to lift her head.
