Shale Hill Secrets

Shale Hill Secrets is a story-focused mature visual novel set at Shale Hill University. You work at the university’s tech help desk when you discover an application that lets you access your classmates’ private data and peer into their hidden lives. As you investigate their secrets, you uncover a conspiracy and a message board where someone is trying to hire a hitman. Your choices can lead you to unravel the conspiracy, save your friends and pursue romances.

Investigate Shale Hill

The application gives you access to classmates’ private data, including pictures. As you weigh the ethics of using military-grade hacking software, you find that people around you are hiding matters with life-or-death stakes. The story spans 17 complete chapters and offers more than 30 hours of gameplay, with over 5,700 CGs and over 220 animations.

Relationships

You build friendships with the women you meet, and those relationships may develop into romance. You can focus on one person or pursue several.

The people of Shale Hill

• Leah: Your lifelong friend and a journalism student, Leah is gentle on the surface, stubborn and spirited within, and determined to expose Shale Hill’s dark truth.
• Sam: Once from the opposite end of your old school’s social pecking order, Sam is now your best friend. Your quirky, distractible friend has become unusually melancholy, and you can investigate why.
• Emily: Your ex, Emily is objective and focused on success. She is willing to make difficult decisions, even when they damage her relationships.
• Valerie: The Student Council President at your college and your old high school, Valerie still sees you as her protégé after you gave it all up. She has faith in you, though you cannot tell whether she is joking or flirting.
• Haley: A blue-haired bartender with ambitions beyond working behind the counter, Haley listens to other people’s problems but is reluctant to share her own.
• Maggie: Maggie prefers animals to people, but has gradually learned to trust you. She must face a past that has left her nervous and silent.
• Lidia: The refined owner of the campus café, Lidia is a well-travelled connoisseur of roasted and brewed things. Her travels have also brought problems back with her.
• Alexis: Shale Hill’s popular “mean girl” is more complicated than she seems. She also considers herself an entrepreneur, despite choosing a highly unethical line of business.
• Linus: Your colleague and workmate, Linus can be both a comrade and an irritatingly smug geek. He is far more comfortable in the tech world than you are.
• Dante: A hard-to-describe Bohemian, Dante combines a party-loving streak with the role of a dependable mentor. He serves cocktails and advice and knows Shale Hill’s party scene.
• Toasterman: Whether he is a homeless man or a superhero depends on whom you ask. He has detective instincts you lack, and listening to him can be worthwhile.