Loose Ties is a turn-based tactical game about deducing out who is at the party. Move through the house, chat to the guests, and dance to get a little extra attention. Deduce the personality of each guest by observing how they behave before the vibes turn sour! Can your social battery hold out for 4 wild nights?

Loose Ties was developed for the 2026 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. Thank you to the organisers!

                                                        

Controls

This is a pico-8 game so the controls will say to press O and X. These map to Z and X on the keyboard, respectively. 

Leaderboard

Completing 4 evenings in Loose Ties will award you with a score. If you post a screenshot in the comments I can shower you in eternal glory by including it in this list.

1. ryanu: 14094
2. Munchkin: 14046
3. Bern: 13036
4. ghettobastler: 12026
5. Jack Turps: 11037
6. Lauren HS: 9030

Credits

The character sprites are adapted from Loren Schmidt's phospher art pack. There's so much character in here, check it out!

Shout Outs

I wanted to include some shoutouts for projects  that I drew inspiration from while making Loose Ties!

First up is Cinco Paus by Michael Brough. I think Cinco Paus is just brilliant and Loose Ties is largely inspired by the way that it uses hidden information to play in the negative space of a design.

Next up is (maybe obviously) Party House by Jon Perry and the UFO 50 team. Although I am complete butt at the game, I love how it expresses the knotted, entangled nature of parties.

Then there's Molly House by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle! Molly House combines hidden roles with parties to create really evocative narratives that can represent all kinds of relationships. That was a big influence here.

Walkthrough 

I've recorded a really quick walkthrough of the first two parties, just to give a feel for how the game works and how you might approach some of the deductions. It is by no means required reading (:

The Fine Print

Because this is a deduction game, it can be useful to have a forensic understanding of the rules, so here are some clarifications of certain terms and behaviours in the game.

1. a guest is any character at the party, including you.
2. an NPC (non-player character) is any character at the party except for you.
3. a guest is adjacent to something if they are one block away from it, orthogonally. That's north, south, east, and west, with no diagonals.
4. a guest is alone when they have no guests adjacent to them.
5. guest A is alone with guest B if guest A is adjacent to guest B, and neither guest A nor guest B are adjacent to any other guests.
6. The same persona will never be assigned to two guests at the same party.
7. Unless stated otherwise in their persona, chatting to an NPC will give them good vibes.
8. Unless stated otherwise in their persona, NPCs will move to a random adjacent tile when you move.
9. All NPCs will move towards you when you dance, regardless of their persona.

If anything in the game feels ambiguous to you, please let me know and I can clarify it here!