Factsheet

• Game KNELL
• Developer Mainframe Gaming — solo-developed, two-person studio
• Genre Survivors-like / bullet heaven, folk horror
• Platforms Steam (Windows, Linux, macOS on Apple Silicon); Android & iOS to follow
• Release Early Access following Steam Next Fest, October 2026
• Price $3.99 — complete game, no ads, no microtransactions; price will not change at 1.0
• Engine None — a bespoke C++ engine, built from the metal up
• Press contact hello@playknell.com
• Site / Discord / X playknell.com · discord · @playknell

In one line

You are the last bellkeeper of a plague-dead parish, ringing the night office while the dead answer — a grim folk-horror survivors-like where the bell keeps the time and the time keeps getting worse.

Description

Each night you ring the passing bell for the dead, as the office demands — but the bell has begun calling something back. Survive from the first toll to matins: twenty minutes of dark, eleven violent rites drawn from grave-craft and sexton's tools, a night that changes as worse things answer, and two Tolling Ones — things the bell named directly. Fall, and the ash you swept buys the parish back a little at a time. Survive, and you may press on into an endless dark that ends every run eventually — how far is up to you.

Every word in KNELL is a real one: the rites, the offices, and the bell-lore are drawn from plague-era church practice — vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango. The parish keeps a lexicon.

Feature points

• The bell keeps time: every minute tolls a worse congregation; elites, surge floods, and two Tolling Ones on a fixed liturgy.
• Eleven rites, each evolving with its paired relic into something the parish never sanctioned.
• The Wick, the ash, the Reliquary: run-based play with a permanent restoration meta between nights.
• Endless mode past dawn, where the bell falls silent and the dark compounds without mercy.
• Full controller support everywhere; native Linux build; no engine, no ads, no dark patterns.
• An audio identity of drone and bell — no soundtrack, on purpose. The toll is the score.

About the developer

Mainframe Gaming is a studio of two: one who backs, one who builds. The building half is a freelance mobile developer of more than a decade who wanted a survivors-like with the lights off, and built one from the metal up — no game engine, a bespoke C++ engine written for this game alone, one codebase from Steam to phones. Every line of KNELL comes from one keyboard. It is the studio's first game.

Trailer

The official trailer is on YouTube: youtu.be/F9uOrr8th1c. Embedding and reuse in coverage need no permission. Every sound in it is the game's own audio, so nothing in it will trip a content claim.

Art & logos

Screenshots are on the Steam store page. Right-click to save; all assets may be used in coverage.

The boring but important part

KNELL™ is a trademark of Mainframe Gaming LLC. Monetization disclosure: paid up front on Steam; free with a single $3.99 unlock on mobile; no ads, no currency, nothing consumable. Streaming and video coverage, monetized or not, is welcome and needs no permission. Privacy.