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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Mandrake
Failbetter Games · Published by Failbetter Games · Official site ↗
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
You are the last of the Mandrakes, a sorcerous line of gardeners. At long last, you’ve returned to your family's abandoned home. Make friends, tend your gardens, and put down roots. Fish, gather and delve in the wilds. Make a place for yourself, and uncover the mysteries your family left behind.
Explore a world where magic meets nature as you cultivate gardens and unravel secrets in this RPG from Failbetter Games. Make your mark in a family legacy left behind by the Mandrakes, a sorcerous line of gardeners.
About this game
Horticulture is a cursed and forbidden practice... except to you. You come from a long line of sorcerers who practiced the green and growing arts, and you’re able to grow such marvels as: runner beans! Cherry trees! The humble turnip!
And as your skills grow, you'll be able to plant stranger seeds, like thunder-calling taran, or rhewyn, which waters your gardens for you. Perhaps you'll even grow a goose-tree! (Where did you think geese came from? Other geese? Preposterous.)
Place beds, decorations and resting spots. Find, plant, nurture, grow and harvest plants both mundane and magical, and gradually expand your gardens into the tangled grounds of your family's abandoned castle.
Discover a beguiling new world inspired by British history and folklore. A world of old, wild powers, of uncanny spirits that reside in those places mortals dare not go; of deep histories, and deeper mysteries.
You won't just work in your gardens. Forage for resources in the nearby woods and along the beach. Go fishing (but take care not to be cursed by the river). Delve into dangerous mines in search of bright minerals and stolen secrets.
Breathe life into the Mandrake lodge with your choice of furnishings and renovations; acquire old books, and spend the evenings reading in the candlelit comfort of your study. Learn to cook. Meet your neighbours, become entangled in their lives, give them gifts and learn their stories.
Long ago, the world changed. The Covenant of the Hearth decreed that the day belonged to humanity, but the night... the night belonged to other things. Now, all earthly lights save hearthfires go out when the sun sets, and the Mara ride the night-winds. Don't go out after dark – the night is not for you.
For now. (After all, what self-respecting sorcerer follows the rules?)
Magic in Mandrake isn't about flashy fireballs and shimmering shields, but about folkloric ingenuity, whimsy and patience. Grow a cherry tree from seedling to maturity in seven days rather than seven years, then fashion your sorcerer's staff from its wood. Befriend a river. Eavesdrop on the dead. Spend a haunted night at the Butcher's Oak. Drink tea with the god who lives in your chimney.
Welcome to the village of Chandley. It's small, it's complicated, and everyone's got their own story.
Meet Rosen – bee-keeper, candlemaker, rook-speaker – the even-handed village leader charged with steering this troublesome community of eccentrics. Or Gideon, the sombre hunter who makes pacts with the wild powers of the woods.
Befriend Nessa, the village smith, whose kindness conceals the scars of an old tragedy; and Thackery, the effusive Voicer, who keeps technology that no-one – least of all he – fully understands.
Visit the lighthouse, where Jory and Ruan Vicory live with young Tamsyn: the girl they saved from the sea, and who still hears voices calling to her from beneath the waves...
Chandley may be small, but it's old, thick with secrets, and set in its ways. Is it ready for the return of a Mandrake?
Encounter the spirits, gods and bogles that live alongside the people of Chandley: the smiling revenant imprisoned in a tree, who claims he knows you (even though he's hundreds of years dead). Lonely, long-armed Granny Jakes in her hidden orchard, who offers you a sip of a drink that the world has forgotten how to make. The Regent of the Woods, bearer of a white crown. The shy thing that whistles an old tune in the depths of a mine no-one has worked in decades. Hroame, who is sometimes stone and sometimes not.
Mandrake is complex and has some very unusual features, so we’ll be seeking ongoing feedback from players. For this reason, we're expecting to run some playtests here on Steam.
If you’d like to hear from us when we release Mandrake or upload a demo, please consider wishlisting the game!
Founded in 2009, we’re an indie game studio known for quality storytelling and highly atmospheric art. You might know us from our other games: Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies and Mask of the Rose, which are set in the world of our long-running browser game Fallen London. In a break from studio tradition, this is a game where you can't eat people.
We are making Mandrake for you, by hand, in the UK and Ireland.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 or 11
- Processor: 2GHZ or higher Intel or AMD CPU
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Direct X 11 or 12 compatible GPU
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 20 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Currently, we plan to support both Linux and Windows when we enter Early Access, and to add macOS support closer to full release.
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
Supported Languages
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
Choices Matter in Mandrake
Mandrake is in Telltale's Choices Matter Festival this week, so we're taking the opportunity to talk about some of the foundational choices for your character in Mandrake. Unusually for our games, in Mandrake a number of things are already determined about your character. You're always a Mandrake, the last descendant of the aristocratic family that once ruled the region. You're always a gardener-sorcerer, resuming arts long-forgotten and long-forbidden. And you're always a newcomer to Penhallion and the village of Chandley, having been born and raised in a far-off land.But that still leaves plenty of room to decide things about your character: name, appearance, history. We don't want character creation in Mandrake to be complex or time-consuming – after all, you'll have plenty of opportunities to define your character with your choices throughout the game. But we do want to give you the chance to make some basic decisions about their past, to provide an initial glimpse of the world beyond Chandley, and to provide more variety for future playthroughs.(I’ve used some screenshots to illustrate the choices. Please bear in mind all these are in-progress; they contain placeholder icons, and are subject to change!) PresentationThe first thing you'll see when you create a new character is this set of options:Here, you'll make a number of simple choices about your character's presentation: body type, skin and hair colour, facial hair, gender, and the colour of your starter clothes. None of these choices are dependent on others -- all of them can be mixed and matched.In some of our previous games we've asked you to choose how NPCs address your character, but you don't get to choose a title this time around – that's already fixed: you're a Mandrake, and most NPCs will either call you that or by your first name (which defaults to 'Morgan', but you can change to whatever you prefer). The 'Gender' field allows you to choose male, female, or non-binary. If all goes well, we hope t...Read full article on Community Announcements (hanchan)Community & EventsOfficial
Mandrake in the Choices Matter Festival
We're in Telltale's Choices Matter festival! We're going to be showing 25 minutes of Mandrake gameplay, focusing on meeting some characters in Chandley and a first look at character creation. This is the most of Mandrake we've shown online anywhere, so it should be full of lots of new juice!Edit to update: Watch the stream today, the 10th of August, at 22:30 BST! Just go to the festival page and take a look at the broadcast tab.Don't worry if you miss the first broadcast; you won't miss out. It'll go up on our YouTube later in the week. :)Read full article on Community Announcements (hanchan)AnnouncementsOfficial
Mandrake at Gamescom
An exciting day for us! We're coming to Gamescom for the first time. Thanks to the backing of IndieArenaBooth, you'll be able to take a look at Mandrake at Gamescom, and meet the team at the IndieArenaBooth stand. It's likely that there will be stickers.We haven't shown at Gamescom with any of our games before, so we'd like to thank IAB for this fantastic opportunity!Here are a few of the other titles which we're excited to see:Bad Magpie is very compelling, as a kind of cross between Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You're Here. Cause mayhem as a one-winged magpie with a fixation on a fallen star!The Midnight Barber is an unusual rhythm game where you're cutting your somewhat supernatural clientele's hair to the beat of a moody soundtrack. Love a rhythm game!Rinthine will be going into Early Access when it first releases, just as we're planning to do with Mandrake, and they seem to be doing everything with a great deal of thought and care. The art style is really appealing, and when I saw that doric column start jumping and bending in the middle, I had to hit the wishlist button.Read full article on Community Announcements (hanchan)AnnouncementsOfficial
Folklore in Mandrake
After nearly sixteen years working in the Victorian milieu for Fallen London (and Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies), Mandrake is giving us an opportunity to draw on a whole new swathe of historical and folkloric sources, and we've been making the most of it. Mandrake is set in a village called Chandley, whose people have to get along with all sorts of neighbours, some of which are far from human. There are regal woods-gods; dangerous, rootless spirits roving the wilds; and gentler, more domestic sprites that nevertheless abide by their own, sometimes obtuse, rules. Here we present a selection of the folklore that has inspired us while inventing the world of Mandrake, in case any of them catch your interest as they did ours. Sunken LandsAtlantis might be the most famous sunken land, but it's far from the only one. For Mandrake, we've taken inspiration from folkloric examples closer to home: lost Lyonesse that lay beyond Land's End in Cornwall, and became associated with Arthurian legend. The lost Brittany city of Ys (or Kaer-Ys), drowned by mortal folly, which features in the collection of Breton folk-songs known as the Barzaz-Breiz. Cantre'r Gwaelod, a land said to lie off the coast of Cardigan, in Gwynedd.In Mandrake, our drowned isle is poor Oleas, which lay just off the coast near Chandley, and was home to the Rose dynasty – the historic rivals to the Mandrakes, our protagonist’s family house. The locals say that on quiet evenings, you can still hear the bells of Oleas ringing under the waves… Seal-FolkHaunting the sunken streets of Oleas are the korrigan, who swim through the sea in the shape of seals, but can take human form on the shore. They are attuned to the tides of fate, dangerous to cross, and have magics of their own. The local sea-fisherman, Ruan, knows to treat seals with the utmost courtesy.These seal-folk are of course primarily inspired by the Scottish legends of selkies, with their seal-skins, and their troubled relations with mortals. A favourite modern...Read full article on Community Announcements (hanchan)AnnouncementsOfficial
Curses and Consequences
You are the last of the Mandrakes, a sorcerous line of gardeners. At long last, you’ve returned to your family's abandoned home. Chandley is a small village, carefully kept, where plenty of the residents remember lean times and don't want to see them come to pass again. Everyone is subject to the Covenant of Weeds, meaning they can't grow things for themselves. It doesn't stop some foolhardy or arrogant people trying. Consequences have varied in the 100 years of the covenant, but there is always a price for trifling with it. Except for you, Morgan Mandrake. Your abilities as a sorcerer-gardener exempt you from the covenant. Do you still pose a danger? Will you lord it over people, or muck in next to them? We hope you enjoy this peep at Mandrake. We'll be at London Games Festival in a few days, exhibiting it live for the first time. Let us know if you're coming by and we'll give you a sticker!Read full article on Community Announcements (hanchan)
