The Chronicles of Nether Wallop

and the Five Bells — press kit

Page last updated October 16, 2026

A parser adventure for readers — a world you explore in your own words, that remembers what you did. Told in screenplay style, by J.P. Freeman. Nether Wallop is a fictional allegory.

Facts

What makes it different

• Dialogue with anyone, in your own words. Type "Old man, what's in the box?" — the game finds the Old Man, opens the dialogue, and he answers in the script.
• The Reader is a character on the page. In dialogue, what you type appears in the screenplay as READER — you see yourself in the story. The page stays clean: tap the chevron to reveal what the Reader entered.
• Told entirely as a screenplay. Third person active action — lean, vivid scenes rather than a thick novel.
• A book that writes itself. The playthrough composes itself into an e-book — pages, chapters, a table of contents — as you read and act.
• 843 scenes. J.P. Freeman wrote the opening and middle of the book by his own hand; the closing chapters, drafted by his AI narrative editor, he is rewriting in his own hand now. Everything that ships passes through him first.
• A parser that meets you halfway. Autosuggest tuned to the current scene — type "u" and the scene offers "use parachute."
• A strategy heart. Gather gold, lumber, and coal to build units and buildings, and battle the overlord's forces. Time passes, factions move, consequences persist.
• Board what you build. Construct a submarine or a dirigible and the Reader climbs aboard and pilots it — under the sea or into the air, in a vehicle of their own making.
• The Nethermeter. Our story's "MacGuffin" device holds the game's only map: through its lens the Reader communicates with troops in distant sectors, recruits neutrals to the resistance, and tracks the bells, their own forces, and the enemy's. Turn graphics off and the story pages read as pure text, in the true text-adventure spirit — but the map still shines through the Nethermeter's lens: it's a device in the story, not a decoration.
• Three timelines. Act One opens at random in 1884, 1984, or 2084 — a ferry boat, an airplane, or a space shuttlecraft: the same scene, a century apart. Chapters can shift the story's timeline — some endings you'll never see, some chapters you'll never reach.
• Completely offline. Once downloaded, the book needs no internet to play — consistent with its no-ads, no-data-collected stance.
• Read it your way. Five typefaces (including Lexend), four page colors, adjustable text size, music and sound toggles — and graphics can be switched off for pure text. On tablet and desktop, the book opens to a two-page spread, like Apple Books on the Mac.
• Five ways to travel: by land, sea, air, over frozen sea ice, and under water.

About the author

J.P. Freeman is a graphic designer turned programmer. He started in print, moved to the web, consulted with Fortune 100 companies on web UI/UX, and ran Widget Press as a software company from 2001 to 2017, shipping FormEntry and ModelBaker for Mac and iOS. The idea for Nether Wallop arrived around 2016; he built proofs of concept from 2018 to 2020, then used the Covid years to work out the mechanics of an interactive fiction book and began programming the engine in earnest, story in hand.

The illustrations began as watercolors and detoured through pen and ink; his finished images are drawn in Procreate and Photoshop — since it is a digital book, after all. Some of the later images began as AI-generated references, which he is redrawing by his own hand, at the same kitchen island; the dated status of the redraws is in the AI section below.

He grew up on a Commodore 64, trading bootleg games over BBS systems through high school, and text adventures held the sweet spot. The pitch behind Nether Wallop is his observation about the modern phone: we read on it, text on it, post on it — we already spend our days in short, typed conversations. In his humble opinion, there has never been a better platform for a text adventure.

The AI question, answered plainly

Nothing is generated while you play. The parser — a deterministic library running on your device — only understands what you type; every reply is pre-written text selected from the finished script, never composed by a model on the fly.

J.P. Freeman wrote the story through Chapter 8 — the opening and middle of the book — by his own hand, in screenplay style, begun in 2016 before today's AI tools existed. The closing chapters were drafted by his AI narrative editor, working from his outlines and direction. He is rewriting those chapters in his own hand now — reading every word, replacing the drafted prose that fails his bar — until the whole book is his. The same editor also reads the full script for continuity, keeping characters, places, and voices steady from scene to scene.

The illustrations began as watercolors, detoured through pen and ink, and are finished in Procreate and Photoshop. Some of the later images began as AI-generated references, which he redraws by his own hand. The standard is plain: every image in the shipped game, drawn by him; the redraws are in progress.

In the engineering, gladly: AI coding agents test the game, playing out scenarios against its hundreds of scenes, hunting down bugs, and fixing them. Widget Press today is one human with a staff of six AI colleagues — testing, editing, arguing, keeping the ship on course. Everything that ships passes through him first.

The short version, for quotation: "One human, six AI colleagues, and a story that was finished before you arrived." Finished in the way that matters while you play: every reply you read was written before you arrived, and nothing is composed on the fly.

Screenshots & assets

Download the press kit (43.1MB zip) — full-resolution screenshots, icon, author photo, and this fact sheet. Click any screenshot to view it full size.

Video

Thirty seconds of real gameplay (App Preview). The original 886×1920 file is in the press kit zip. More gameplay video on the Nether Wallop YouTube channel.

Review copies and promo codes on request: inquiry@widgetpress.com.

Interviews

J.P. Freeman is happy to join your podcast, YouTube channel, or stream as a guest — and available for written interviews and articles. Ask: inquiry@widgetpress.com.

Credits

Music — victoriana_loop, mad_scientist (Joe Baxter-Webb / BossLevelVGM), blackmoor_tides (Matthew Pablo), caves_of_sorrow (Alexandr Zhelanov) — CC BY 3.0 · breathing (Neostead) — CC0

Sound effects — Church Bell, Death Bell (Ulrich Metzner) · Tesla Coil Powered Death Ray (Hansjörg Malthaner) — CC BY 3.0, via OpenGameArt

Software — built on compromise (Spencer Kelly), JsStore (Ujjwal Gupta), Svelte, and UIkit (YOOtheme) — all MIT licensed