Zhuge Liang and Sherlock Holmes will meet in an unusual contest of deduction in After-State: WoLong, a newly revealed PC game from developer CnD Games and publisher Right Mind. Set in a surreal afterlife, the game casts players as Zhuge Liang and places them opposite Holmes in the Underworld Olympics. A snowed-in mountain lodge provides the setting for a deadly closed-circle mystery, with serial murders and supernatural tricks complicating the investigation.
Players will examine crime scenes through a top-down investigation mode, exploring overhead maps of their surroundings. Zhuge Liang’s “Yin-Yang” system then shifts attention to the suspects themselves, allowing players to identify anomalies in testimony and approach deductions from different angles. Both truths and bluffs can be used to break down their psychological defences.
Deduction duels with Holmes form another part of the challenge. According to the announcement, a single misstep against him can cost players the entire game. The supernatural cases will also be accompanied by humorous dialogue.
The reveal comes as Right Mind outlines its publishing direction, with 10 games already released and five more in its launch pipeline. The label says it is prioritising character-driven games that offer distinctive emotional experiences across different genres.
Right Mind Operations Lead Zhang Zishao explained how the label’s inspiration informs its existing catalogue and its plans for After-State: WoLong:
We’re openly inspired by ‘The Melancholy’ by Haruhi Suzumiya: the idea that the extraordinary is hidden inside the ordinary, and that a story can pull players out of the mundane into something that genuinely moves them. That’s why we’ve named our new publishing label ‘Right Mind’ after the right brain: the hemisphere of emotion, intuition, and sensory thinking. I guess you could call us the right-brain publisher. In an industry where publishing is mostly data- and market-driven (left-brain), Right Mind is deliberately feeling-first. In other words, we genuinely believe the games that leave a mark reach people through feelings, not just mechanics.
And you can find the proof of that in our current roster that includes, among others, ‘Eastern Era’ (martial-arts sect survival), ‘Dread Flats’ (first-person Chinese horror), and ‘Trials of Innocence’ (courtroom detective drama). Three genres, one throughline: every title is built to stir emotions.
We want to continue this approach with our upcoming game – a surreal afterlife deduction adventure, ‘After-State: WoLong’, to give players something the AI age is quietly taking away: wonder, meaning, and experiences worth feeling.
After-State: WoLong is in development for PC and can now be wishlisted on Steam.
