Eight months. Five Codices. Over six hundred pages. When we first cracked open the Archive back in January, we thought we were making a cozy little cataloguing game about a haunted library. What we got instead was a sprawling, labyrinthine project that ate our evenings, our weekends, and occasionally our sanity.

Today, we can finally say it out loud: The Archivium is complete.

A Finished Library

The Archivium began as a 226-page soloRPG of dark academia and cozy horror, where you play a first-year student drawn into the mysteries of a secret society. But it never stopped growing. Each Codex brought something new to the shelves:

• Codex 01: Love & Loathing + Codex 02: Love Beyond the Veil (Starter Pack): NPC creation, relationships, and a haunted Valentine’s mailroom mystery.

• Codex 03: The Academic Register: A full academic life simulator. Degrees, electives, exams, clubs, and burnout. The university itself became as dangerous as the Archive.

• Codex 04: Idle Hands & Interludes: Cozy downtime flavour with weekend festivals, strange campus traditions, and a few new ways to recover from everything else.

• Codex 05: The Hidden Curriculum: The long-awaited Society expansion. Mentors, rituals, and fifteen Fields of Study to choose from. Magic, finally, but always at a cost.

Together, that’s more than 600 pages of content. A whole library of prompts, tables, mysteries, and endings.

And now we’ve shut the doors. No more Codices, no more monthly expansions... at least not this year. 

The Complete Bundle

For those who want it all in one go, we’ve put together the Archivium Complete Collection—base game plus all five Codices, bundled for $20. That’s the full 600+ pages at about a third off the individual prices.

Thank You

We can’t end this without saying thank you. Truly. This game started during NaGaDeMon as a “let’s see if we can write a haunted library in a month” challenge. It turned into our flagship release, our late-night obsession, and honestly our baby.

Seeing people download, play, and share their stories (Custodians writing their journals, posting about their NPCs, or nervously cataloguing the Archive’s stranger artifacts) has been overwhelming in the best way. The fact that anyone has spent time in this little world with us means more than we can say.

So: thank you for playing. Thank you for supporting us on Itch, DriveThru, and Patreon. Thank you for keeping the Archive alive.

What’s Next?

The Archive may be complete, but LichLight isn’t closing up shop. In fact, we’re about to head out onto the open road. 

Next up is The Coldest Shoulder, a supernatural horror game about forgotten highways, liminal maps, and the things that wait on the road’s shoulder when no one is there to help you. Think Ironsworn, but for haunted road trips across drowned forests, ghost towns, and deserts where the sun never sets right.

Playtesting starts September/October.

Join Us

If you’ve got questions, want to share your actual plays, or just hang out with others cataloguing strange things, the Discord is open. 

The Archive is whole. It’s yours now. Thank you for helping us fill its shelves.

See you on the road.