Some games announce themselves with a feature list. After the Wane announces itself with a number: 2,000 hand-traced dance frames. Not a typo, not marketing fluff. Someone sat down and traced, by hand, two thousand frames of choreography for an interactive graphic novel, and honestly that alone got my attention before I even knew what the story was about.

The game launches on PC on November 10, 2026, and it's being billed as an interactive graphic novel, which usually means branching narrative, meaningful choices, the whole visual novel adjacent space. What makes this one different is the craft. Instead of the usual static character sprites with a couple of blinking frames, the dance sequences here were traced by hand, frame by frame. Per the original report on MSN, all 2,000 of those dance frames are hand-traced. That's a level of patience you almost never see outside of passion projects.

If you've ever watched the dance scenes in FFXIV during a Moonfire Faire event, or spent a raid night emoting with your guild before pull, you know how rare it is for games to make characters feel like they actually live in their bodies. Most of the time it's canned loops. This is the opposite: slow, painstaking, human.

Dance is one of the hardest things to animate convincingly, by the way. Weight transfer, the small hesitation before a step, the way a hand follows through after the body has already stopped. Most studios solve that with mo-cap and call it a day. Hand tracing every frame is doing it the hard way, and until we see more of the game in motion we won't know exactly how those drawings come together on screen, but two thousand of them says something regardless.

There's a community angle here too, and you knew I'd find one. Interactive fiction thrives on its readers. These games live or die by the people who sit with them, argue about the branching paths in Discord, make flowcharts of every ending. A project where the animation itself is the hook is going to attract the frame-by-frame obsessive crowd, the folks who screenshot moments just to study how they were drawn. Give it a month after launch and there will be comparison threads, animation breakdowns, maybe even people tracing their own homages.

The November 10 date also drops into a genuinely crowded fall, and I've said before that good games find their people regardless of the marketing window. A hand-crafted interactive graphic novel is about as far from the blockbuster crush as you can get in terms of audience. If anything, all those loud neighbors might work in its favor. A quiet harbor for anyone who wants something intimate while the big releases roll through.

TJ and I were talking about this the other day, about how the games that stick with you are rarely the loudest ones. He'll argue the FFV sprites did more with less than any modern engine, and I'll counter with my raid team's reactions to FFXIV's story beats, but we land in the same place: craft shows. Two thousand hand-traced frames is craft you can see in a single GIF.

So November 10, PC. If you're into interactive fiction, animation, or just the idea of someone doing things the hard way because the hard way looks better, keep this one on your list. And if you do pick it up, tell me which dance sequence got you. I have a feeling there's going to be one that everyone talks about.