Hi all! It's me, Kevin, project director on Four Horsemen. It's been a long time. This update fixes some longstanding issues that have bothered players for years:

• Some foods associated with some homelands have been changed. My sincere apologies to the people of Cornwall.
• If you have an existing save where your Riders are from Angleterre, Adivasiram, or the Green Isles, and you are at a specific point in Pestilence's route where you have platters of home-cooked food in your inventory, you will no longer be able to gift this food, as it no longer belongs to your culture. You should be able to make new food without issue, and this will not block your progression.
• Some linguistic errors have been fixed. My apologies also to the people of France.
• The Shrapnel Plowshare is now properly buildable.

• Many double "the"s are eliminated. (as in "the the Levant").
• Better A/An detection, e.g. it's "an Angleterrish" and not "a Angleterrish".
• A lot of capitalization issues are fixed (probably not all of them).
• Many typos are fixed.
• All snacks are now plural.
• Migrated to Ren'Py 7.4.8.1895, which should fix some compatibility issues on newer PC and macOS hardware (including at least one reported crash on start issue).

POSTGAME

• The Hangman's Throne is now the Scoundrel's Refuge.
• There's a small amount of new content (most of it involving the postgame musical instruments), and a lot of postgame content that was previously broken or inaccessible is fixed.
• There are new scenes introducing most of the postgame musical instruments.
• Each character's postgame musical instrument has several new abilities when built, all of which are intended to make it less cumbersome to play through a route again (in order to see different endings). A few of them make it much faster to get useful items you would normally find in that route.
• Crafting resource costs for all of the postgame instruments have been significantly reduced.
• Postgame musical instruments are now too powerful for the police to destroy.

QUALITY OF LIFE

• Once Famine applies for a job in one playthrough, he can apply for a job in all of them. (No more jumping into the dumpster over and over at the start of the game just so he can get a job.)
• Social media now works as intended, and keeps track of all the grievances you've seen in previous playthroughs.
• Death can no longer enrage herself by reading her own social media posts.
• Some small tweaks to make dumpster diving less of a hassle, especially if you need one specific item and are unlucky.
• You can now buy as many shovels as you want.

PROGRESSION

• Act I of Pestilence's route has been reworked to be less confusing and feel less arbitrary.
• For homelands where the Great Tragedy in Pestilence's route is atonement for a genocide, what happened during the Great Tragedy should be less confusing.
• It was possible to start Act II of Pestilence's route twice, which I now understand is where some players got lost.
• Grievances have improved UI messaging.
• Acts II and III of Death's route begin in different places than they did before.
• The health indicators in the final boss battle of Death's route have been recolored and enlarged so they are harder to miss.
• Changes to the wall of seals are explained better.
• Fixed some bugs in which you could lose access to certain scenes by using quest items to build non-quest things.
• Fixed a bug in which being too meek in Famine's route would cause the game to crash.

In light of recent revelations regarding recent and ongoing human rights abuses at the southern border of the United States, Nuclear Fishin' Software will donate 100% of our profits (after credit card fees, taxes, marketplace fees, and other costs incurred in the process of sale) from this year's itch.io Summer Sale and Steam Summer Sale to the National Immigrant Justice Center. The NIJC, part of the Chicago-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit Heartland Alliance, provides pro bono legal representation to low-income immigrants facing deportation from the USA, including unaccompanied migrant children, ICE detainees, and seekers of political asylum. They also provide legal assistance to other immigration lawyers throughout the country who are handling deportation cases, and on top of that they lobby politicians in Washington, D.C. for fairer, more humane immigration law with a concrete path to legal citizenship. Nuclear Fishin' is donating to the NIJC because they strike a good balance between directly helping individual migrants and fighting the systemic issues that produce the appalling conditions in American detainment camps that have recently been all over the news. We are offering a discount this June not to stiff the NIJC, but to make sure we appeal to as many people as possible. Are you bewildered by all the angry rhetoric on social media, but open-minded enough to learn what these kids are going to go through for the rest of their lives, from a creative team who have been there? This is the time to spring for a purchase. Do you just want to help abused kids at the border and get a free computer game as thanks? This is an opportunity for you as well. Four Horsemen was born out of the urgent desire to express to non-immigrants the lifelong alienation, dehumanization, rootlessness, and historical trauma of growing up between countries, an experience that I and every other immigrant who contributed their stories to this project share profoundly. It brings me considerable grief to see another generation join our ranks, subjected to a depth of inhumanity that will scar them for generations, in ways that are already too familiar to several members of our development team. It has become clear that we will never see a change in the United States's byzantine, catch-22-ridden, inhumane immigration policy until we can get American voters to fully understand its human cost. But that cultural change will come slowly. For now, what the US needs is immigration lawyers who can fight for individual families in court. Immigrants do not steal jobs or threaten national security any more than citizens do. Citizens and permanent residents gain nothing from keeping immigrants in political limbo. Whether you buy from us or not, if you are an American--or if you live in a democratic country which has committed similar human rights abuses against immigrants recently, such as Greece, Australia, France, or Kenya--I urge you to write your government representatives to urge them for more humane treatment of refugees and migrants, and a clear and timely path to asylum or citizenship. Don't let yourself become part of a silent majority--xenophobic policy only endures with the perception of popular support. Thank you. Kevin Chen Director, Nuclear Fishin' Software

Hey everyone! As you've likely already noticed, we're participating in Steam's Halloween sale, because ghosts are scary and so is xenophobia. We'd also like to share some of the buzz around the game recently, including this wonderful, thorough review by VN developer and critic The Friendly Senpai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAFeaV-S8Rs We are also featured at the beginning of a new episode of History Respawned, the podcast where professional historians talk about history in video games. This episode features Bob Whitaker, associate professor of European history and digital humanities at Louisiana Tech, and John Harney, assistant professor of Asian history at Centre College in Kentucky. (If you missed the previous episode of History Respawned where Professor Whitaker interviews our director Kevin Chen about Four Horsemen, you can find it here.) Have a happy Halloween and a good Da de Muertos, and may the living cross borders instead of the dead.

Hey everyone! As you've likely already noticed, we're participating in Steam's Halloween sale, because ghosts are scary and so is xenophobia. We'd also like to share some of the buzz around the game recently, including this wonderful, thorough review by VN developer and critic The Friendly Senpai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAFeaV-S8Rs We are also featured at the beginning of a new episode of History Respawned, the podcast where professional historians talk about history in video games. This episode features Bob Whitaker, associate professor of European history and digital humanities at Louisiana Tech, and John Harney, assistant professor of Asian history at Centre College in Kentucky. (If you missed the previous episode of History Respawned where Professor Whitaker interviews our director Kevin Chen about Four Horsemen, you can find it here.) Have a happy Halloween and a good Da de Muertos, and may the living cross borders instead of the dead.

A new version of Four Horsemen, v1.2, has been released! This version mostly fixes bugs reported since the release of our Migrant Spring update, among them:

• Fixed crash when Buddhist or Christian characters murder their boyfriends
• Buying the feather duster in the tutorial no longer traps Famine in the hardware store
• Fixed rendering artefacts on some screen resolutions after entering combat
• Various small fixes and improvements

A new version of Four Horsemen, v1.2, has been released! This version mostly fixes bugs reported since the release of our Migrant Spring update, among them:

• Fixed crash when Buddhist or Christian characters murder their boyfriends
• Buying the feather duster in the tutorial no longer traps Famine in the hardware store
• Fixed rendering artefacts on some screen resolutions after entering combat
• Various small fixes and improvements

Hey everyone! Four Horsemen was recently nominated as an IndieCade 2017 Finalist! If you're attending IndieCade 2017 in Los Angeles on October 6-8, come by the Nuclear Fishin' Software booth to say hi to us and play some Four Horsemen. Lots of fantastic games this year, and we're honored to be presenting Four Horsemen among them. - Kevin

Hey everyone! Four Horsemen was recently nominated as an IndieCade 2017 Finalist! If you're attending IndieCade 2017 in Los Angeles on October 6-8, come by the Nuclear Fishin' Software booth to say hi to us and play some Four Horsemen. Lots of fantastic games this year, and we're honored to be presenting Four Horsemen among them. - Kevin

Exciting Bullet Points!!

• YOUR DECISIONS MATTER. Hard choices you make at the beginning come back to haunt you at the end. Characters turn out to be heroic or villainous depending on how you treat them--and they don't always reward you for treating them well.
  
• NO TWO COUNTRIES PLAY ALIKE. Each homeland has its own unique vocabulary, cultural values, prejudices, and history. Choices that are a good idea in one country turn out to be a reaaaaally bad idea in another. Like a real immigrant, you'll have to read your new culture and learn to adapt.
  
• NOT JUST BLACK AND WHITE. No faction reputation system! No alignment meter! Four Horsemen offers realistic, genuinely difficult moral choices, and to some questions there are no right answers--only different consequences.
  
• DELIGHTFUL CRAFTING SYSTEM. Make that cold, austere war bunker feel like home! Dive into dumpsters scrounging for parts, or buy them with your earnings from your terrible day job, and make DIY versions of things you could never afford! Characters interact with things you build. Make a disco ball and they'll throw a dance party, patch up that hole in the roof and they'll enjoy a quiet moment together on a rainy day. But beware--the system is not exactly fair to immigrants...
  
• TRIUMPH OVER HATE. A stranger pulls a knife on you and screams at you to leave town--what do you do? Do you try to de-escalate the situation with words...or respond by drawing your own blade? Our combat system replicates the anxiety and terror of real violence, not a power fantasy.
  
• THE MOST ADVANCED PROFANITY SYSTEM IN A VIDEO GAME, EVER. Audited by real current and former teenaged native speakers! Learn how to cast aspersions on a person's ancestry in 10 different real-world languages!

• Memory: 512 MB RAMStorage: 292 MB available space
• Storage: 292 MB available space