An independent game studio
We keep the lights low.
Mainframe Gaming is a small indie studio making dark, atmospheric games — quiet horror, folk dread, and worlds lit by a single candle.
Now in development
KNELL
Ring the passing bell. Survive until dawn.
You are the last bellkeeper of a plague-dead parish. Each night you ring the passing bell for the dead — but the bell has begun calling something back. A grim, candle-lit survivors-like: one thumb, twenty minutes, a churchyard that will not stay quiet.
- Auto-attacking bullet-heaven runs from first toll to matins bell
- Eight violent rites, eight relics, and evolutions to discover
- Permadeath nights, persistent restoration of the parish between them
- $3.99 on Steam, complete. Free to try on mobile with a single unlock — no ads, ever
- Steam Win · Linux · Mac
- Android
- iOS
The studio
Small team. Dark rooms.
Mainframe Gaming is a small independent studio. We haven't shipped a game yet — KNELL will be our first — and we'd rather show you something finished and strange than something early and loud.
We're drawn to horror that whispers instead of screams: plague-era folk dread, wax and ash and bone, the quiet before a bell tolls. Restraint is our art direction. Grim, not gory-for-fun.
How we got here
Mainframe Gaming was almost something else entirely. The first plan was a cyber café crossed with a trading-card shop — screens along one wall, card binders along the other, a room for people to gather and play. Then the AI boom sent the price of computer components somewhere a small studio couldn't follow, and a room full of machines stopped being a plan we could keep.
So we turned to the trade we already knew by hand: a decade of freelance mobile development, and the conviction that joy doesn't need a storefront. That trade taught us to build small and close to the metal — it's why KNELL runs on a bespoke C++ engine of its own instead of someone else's, one codebase from Steam to your phone. Different room, same intention: somewhere for people to gather and play.
Atmosphere first
Every system serves the mood. If a feature breaks the quiet, it goes.
Built by hand
We write our own tech — small, bespoke runtimes tuned for the games we make.
Fair by design
No ads. No currency packs. No dark patterns — the only darkness is on screen.
Contact
The parish keeps a ledger.
Press, players, or the merely curious — write to us. We read everything, usually by candlelight.