September 17, 2025

Wednesdays: Deleted Scenes

In video games, it’s not uncommon to have huge amounts of content cut from the final release.

I, however, have always been pretty lucky in this respect. Almost nothing was cut from Bury Me My Love, almost nothing was cut from Haven nor from Road 96: Prologue, and once again: almost nothing was cut from Wednesdays.

Today, we’ll focus on the “almost”.

As I already explained in a previous newsletter, Wednesdays’ scenes have all been drafted back in 2022 in a matter of weeks. Some of them have changed considerably in the final game, some stayed more or less the same and two of them… vanished. 

Amir and Elinaba. 

…These are their stories. 

Elinaba

Elinaba was bringing us back to the early internet era, with its noisy modems, vintage GIFs and infamous chat rooms.

It featured 12 year old Tim chatting on AIM with an older teenage girl nicknamed Elinaba. They would joke, they would flirt, until Elinaba would start sending him nudes and then requesting some. Tim would or would not proceed depending on the dialogue choices, but it would become clear in the end that Elinaba probably wasn’t a teenage girl.

This scene never left the draft stage for a few reasons:

- First, an AIM interface isn’t something fun to draw, and not the very best way to make use of Exaheva’s talents.

- Secondly, the AIM era being a highly specific moment in time, I feared this scene would only appeal to players who lived that era, and would make the game less universal.

- Lastly, and that was by far the most important reason: If the scene was only including Tim and “Elinaba”, that would mean the players would play as Elinaba, a probable pedophile. And as I explained in this previous newsletter, this is something I absolutely wanted to avoid.

This cut was clearly for the best, but if you were appealed by the idea of revisiting the old internet in a video game, I can recommend Emily is Away, Videoverse or Hypnospace Outlaw. Those games all do it way better than Wednesdays would have.

Amir

While Elinaba was cut in the draft phase, Amir got a much better run, making it to the prototype phase. That means you get to enjoy my gorgeous placeholders.

This scene was set in a dense city and had you play a 12 years old kid (Amir) selling stuff in a car boot sale. In this dialogue-based shop management sim, you would try to make the most money out of your old junk, haggling with potential customers, telling stories, being smart.

These customers would include two younger kids interested in your Beyblade spinning-tops, a student looking for change for her own stand next to yours, a mother way more trained at haggling than you, an old cranky lady, a friend from school and, eventually, Tim, who would buy an old PC game who belonged to your father: Orco Park.

As you now understand, the goal of this scene was to strengthen the links between Orco Park and Tim’s story. However, the more progress we made with the game, the more we realized that the explanation behind Orco Park was already made clear enough, and that this scene, if played late in the game, would feel a bit redundant and weak.

Keeping it might not have been a huge deal but cutting it would allow us to spend more time on the other scenes and would make the production much less stressful. So I made the call.

If you can read French, you can still enjoy what this scene looked like in one of its last iterations.

The survivors

Two other scenes also came quite close to being cut at some point:

“Angelo”, because I thought hinting at other people’s stories might drive away from Tim’s and create some confusion.

And “Claude”, because I thought nobody would understand the whole “wall” thing, that it was way too much to unpack/explain in a single scene.

But when we first playtested the prototypes, both scenes turned out to be amongst the players’ favorites, and keep in mind that this is what they looked like by then:

So we kept them, improved them, polished them. And if you did enjoy these scenes,now you know who you should thank our amazing playtesters: Anabelle Michon, Léo Duquesne, Delphine Fourneau, Cécile Fléchon, Grégory K. Mizol, Isabelle Arvers, Audrey Guyot, Antoine Herren, Géraldine Piallat, Marie Coignus, Julien Delample, Yoan Fanise, Marine Fabri, Jérémie Dancel, Felix Charreton, Jean-François Lagrange, Noémie Havet, Jeanne Curtenaz, Elsa Glénat, Lalo Torres, Maxime Lapousterle, Lesly Lila, Lou Bonnaventure, Fabien Viale, Baptiste Billet, Johan Markarian, Robin Chopin, Alexandre Mouillé, Emilie Kuoch, Hélène Menanteau, Mérane Maulavé, Paula Ruiz (Fingerspit), Marina González, Jordi de Paco Alcántara (credited as Jordi De Paco), Lise Desvallées, Xavier Arnauld De Sartre, Yacine Benel, Lou Lüeder, Thomas Le Floch, Jean-Charles Cesar

As usual, please feel free to share this newsletter with your friends if you enjoyed it, and if you haven’t played the game yet, you can still find it on Steam and itch.

Have a nice day!