Will the expansion feature a new mystery or a new "quest"? Does it gives more hints towards the puzzles that were already present?

It takes the mysteries that were already there to the conclusion we envisioned, which does involve showing off things we couldn't before. In practice it should feel like it adds a good handful of mysteries that are connected to the ones you already looked into. And yes, it does add a quest that has its own puzzles. Yes, plural. The puzzles that were already there should feel more fleshed out now, too.

Is the conclusion towards the secret shed going to be added on a later update still? If so, does that means we will still revisit the hinterlands after ch 18? Perhaps involving the other guests to the hotel?

The conclusion to the shed will come in a later update and I'm very excited to show that off. I've been joking for a while now that we'll have "Pedro's Return to the Hinterlands" someday. However, the content we're adding in this update is a "thematic continuation" of the shed, and in fact accessing it is one of the pre-requisites (more specifically, unlocking an achievement tied to it that we're implementing with the update) for the expansion scenes to pop up.

On some aspects The Feathered Line is a follow-up to the shed and many of its scenes assume you read and thought about it. The more you were fascinated by the shed, the more the expansion will interest you.

I've realized later that Pedro's feathers have displayed more magical powers than most of the cast, being able to remotely monitor and pass down memories. Beyond physical attributes, we only got hints of Asterion/Storm affinity to water and Khembish's bad luck. How capable at magic are each of the characters? and are there other powers that have been shown already, even if subtetly, beyond the ones i mentioned?

Magic in this universe is unfair and not everyone has a strong affinity to it, or they don't have innate talents that are useful. Some have it better, others have it worse. And when someone has magical properties to them, it isn't always visible, or they might affect people differently depending on gender. To name a few:

Luke is nearly indestructible, to such an extent he could take a grenade blast to the face and shrug it off like it was nothing. Kota is a small river deity and he used to enjoy all the powers you'd expect out of a kami from Shinto tradition, though he's lost much of it, and he's learned some rites over the years. Khenbish is cursed with bad luck and has no powers, but his sisters enjoy incredible fertility and aren't affected by the curse. And Robert can see souls.

There are more discreet powers/magical properties in the story, but noticing they are there is part of the experience, so I won't you help with that.

Speaking of rites in particular, though, they are a dying art. Few people learn them nowadays because they just aren't that useful compared to the time it takes to get good at them. Not only that, different traditions require different things out of their ritemasters so you might have been born in a culture whose rites require something you don't have. In this sense Pedro is lucky because his feathers are sacrifices of the highest quality for the Latin tradition.

How did you came about deciding Pedro's species as a peacock? I understand the correlation that it would have with his true identity revealed later on. Still, i'm curious about how the process went down.

First and foremost was the association between peacocks and the mythological Argos, which led to the magical feathers and all the ways we used them in the story (the ones in the bedrock, for starters). The feathers really were a great plot device, and you'll see more of them in The Feathered Line. We also liked that peacocks are birds, as it adds some diversity to the cast both in species and in body type (P is shorter, thinner, almost twink-ish, and only really muscular on his chest.)

But, on top of that, the peacock has always been something I associate with the real life hinterlands. When I was a kid I visited my family there and they had peacocks in their farm. Their colors evidently match Brazil's flag, too. But perhaps the most important thing is that I associated the hinterlands with a story my father used to tell me, a little folklore short story called "The Romance of the Mysterious Peacock".

It was a storm of perfect elements, all leading up to the peacock becoming to me the most appropriate symbol of what I wanted to portray. Usually I like it when we can wrap multiple things like that in a single design choice.

The previous side updates all had some naughty content included. Will this one too?

In true Latin American magical realism fashion, sex will be mentioned but it won't involve the Pedro or Oscar and it isn't titillating. It's part of plot things.

Considering how the original hinterlands would change certain aspects to the places you visited depending on what you found out before, will this principle apply to the new locations?

Yes, and we took it a few steps further. In fact we took it as far as it was mathematically possible to. It was very funny when we had to cut some variations because their pre-requisites were impossible to achieve in the time the player has.

If you want to see ALL of the lines in the expansion that will require a few playthroughs, there's a lot of unique text. But we don't expect people to do it all on their own, this is why we have this forum.

Is ThE aNt HiLl based of a real thing?

Maybe the real anthill was the roadside pee breaks  the friends we made along the way.

No, but they are the next after this one. Chapters 19 and 20 will come out together.

You'll get a bit more Brazilian folklore with this update, but I won't give any details at this moment. You'll have to find it out for yourself :) As for the children's plotline, I'll just tell you to play the update as a detective.

And for a fun question: if Minotaur Hotel got picked up for an adaptation episodic series (singles season adaptation from beginning to end) on a streaming service, what kind of medium would you all like to see it in, animation or live action?

Oof, that's a tough one. I like practical costumes but it'd require a special kind of horny gremlin to translate the characters and their sex appeal to them, and finding that sort of talent would be maybe too difficult.  Animation would probably be the best option, I imagine there are plenty of animators who can get it. As for style, I'd like something that sticks to an aesthetic that's attractive to the gay crowd, while still having some cartoonish-ness to keep things a bit lighthearted.

The human characters like Greta should at times be portrayed in unsettling, photo-realistic ways and with a very ominous, almost Eldritch aura :) Of course, the MC shouldn't get that treatment.

I'm glad we got someone to read Anne Carson, she's such a joy. Hopefully reading Autobiography of Red added something to reading Minotaur Hotel, too.

Hi M3tav0X, that is a valid concern! I'm with you there that Pedro's story should be able to have a happy ending regardless of the nature of his and Oscar's relationship, so worry not. Seconding what Minoanon said, you will still be able to get Pedro to join the hotel after chapter 18 even if he and Storm don't end up in a romantic relationship. Spending time together during Hinterlands III is one of the factors that nudges him in that direction but it's not the only one, your performance in the other quests also has an effect on this.

In fact Pedro joining instead of Nikos will be the most likely outcome (I expect most players to not have Nikos join on their first playthrough since the method to get him is a lot more complicated).

Pretty much all of it was stuff I wanted to do from the start. You can check the Hinterlands Postmortem, in the Cut Content section, and you'll see that three of the five new events we added were explicitly mentioned there. I already had a very solid idea of what should happen in these scenes and how it connected to the larger narrative. I felt very strongly that without them the story of the Hinterlands wasn't as much of a "fair play" detective story as I wanted it to be.

The other two (The Cemetery and The Parade) were already on my mind but not as concretely. Still you can see some of the ideas were already there. The idea that stores close down on the last day (September 7th, the Independence Day holiday) was tied with the idea of letting P and Storm watch the parade going through town, which would give a nice capstone to the bond the two created with each other.

As for the Cemetery... Well, I actually managed to put in a hint about what my idea was for it in T̸̢̳̦̲͕̳̳͛̈́̂̈͒̀̈́͗͆̀̀͝H̸͇̘̭̟͛͂̋̕͝͠Ȩ̸̗̞̗̲͉̤̝̝̒̏̋̌̈́͛͒̾͝ ̴̧̨̛̟̲͓͕̗͈͕̀̍̾̍̓͝ͅÁ̷̟̪͔͖̆́̍͌́̚͘̚͘͝͝N̴̢̡̢̰̍͛͐̄̀̂̀̆͐̇̂͆̀͊̂T̷̛̜͋̓̀̇̔͑̊̉̌̕H̸̪̥͕̯͔̦̖͙̬͇̙̲̫͎̒̾́I̶͇̭͖̥̱͎͇̽̑Ľ̴̞̹̠͂̆̾̽̽̂̓̈́́͠L̸̫̜̙̰̝̫̥̔̋̃̽̀̓ of all places. I already had an idea of what I wanted but, seeing as I didn't have time to put it in, I was a cheeky little shit and slipped it there. Both as a hint and as a reminder for myself about what I thought was a neat idea.

The stuff that really emerged during production were some of the loot drops you can find in the expansion. For a few of them I was already 100% sure what I wanted them to be, but for the most part I developed what they were about quite late in development, sort of as a cherry on top.

Another thing that came up during development was me writing down the history and some of the rites of the Latin tradition. I didn't put that into the game, it would have been very unnecessary and bloated, but that was a late thing that helped with figuring out what I wanted out of the loot drops.

Let's say I was about to start a fresh story that's meant to portray my culture. To do so, I'm going to pull what I can, what was most remarkable, from my experiences of all kinds.

For me, this involves the books I've read, the stories I was told. For another person it might involve the music they heard, the instruments used here, the lyrics, the styles of past musicians. For yet another person it could mean the sceneries, the landscapes, descriptions of what it feels like to be there. For another person it could be something far more specific, like capturing what it was like to grow there, how life was like as a child in this particular environment, what their home was like. Or, while talking about a place, you can also talk about other places and how they compare to it, exploring your experience in only having live in the first one for a limited time.

I believe that creating art about a culture, your culture, is not the kind of thing you can follow a recipe for. I think you should approach it as a bit of an improvisational exercise, using what you have on hand and what is most meaningful to you. In your case, going only from what you told me in your question, I'd suggest you try and remember as much as you can about the time you spent immersed in your culture and write it down as bullet points. Don't worry about not remembering big and important things. Instead, take note of what daily life was life. How food tasted, how people talked, the sounds of your home, what school was like, what friends (or lack of them) were like, what media you were exposed to, whether you felt like you were fitting in or not, your insecurities and your happiest moments, so on.

Take note of all those things which are very particularly yours, which meant something to you, then take a step back. Look at all of it from a distance and then let yourself feel which ones you'd like to explore the most.

To bring a very real comparison, the idea for the flooded town in the hinterlands came from watching a movie when I was 9 or 10 in school. I couldn't even remember what the movie was called, I couldn't find it, but that was a spark that led me to adding that element to the story. The idea of the hinterlands being infested by butterflies came from my father having to drive through many swarms of them when we went there on a trip. Moths bringing good luck is a superstition my mom told me about.

If I had to make a list of the most important things in the real life hinterlands, none of those things would be there. But they were remarkable to me, and I could extract meaning out of them.

You can do the same. Gather your ideas, then select which ones feel the most resonant and dive deeper into them. Do some research on those points in particular. Be emotionally honest with yourself and see how those things, including the brief time you spent in your culture, make you feel. Take note of what insecurities pop up, what makes you uncomfortable, and try to be your own therapist in order to crack what's going on. Gather all of those things, the good, the bad and the personal, and make your collage of your culture.

It doesn't have to be a 1:1 representation of reality. What matters the most is making it meaningful and very intellectually honest. Writers can only do so much to capture a complex reality in writing, and people can rightfully criticize us for not getting things right, but that doesn't matter so much when there's a great deal of honesty there. It speaks louder.

I had a whole draft of the story in short format written down before we started work on the game. I knew where the story started and where it'd end, and what were the important points we had to touch on the way. Many of the side characters were there, like Luke, Kota and Robert. Some were more or less planned but not yet implemented, like Khenbish (who then we called Zhu). There were even characters we haven't introduced yet (like Kota's brother and the hydra.)

The story was always about Asterion, with the side cast coming in to get the point across about creating a community and to introduce their own plots to break the monotony of what was a rather chill love story. They also provided levity, comic relief, and moments of honesty. The story as a whole would be very depressing without them.

Oscar was there too, though a bit different. In the original draft he showed up on the final stretch, when 95% of Asterion's character arc was completed. He was more like a cherry on top, and he'd arrive already having gone through a lot of the story arc we see in the game. You could say that Oscar arrived having already gone through his jump into full adulthood, while in the game we follow that process through Pedro's eyes.

Now, before I continue... While Oscar was introduced at the end of the first draft, chronologically he's one of the oldest characters I've had floating in my head. Originally Oscar and Pedro were the protagonists of a novel I was meaning to write someday — a detective story about an ex-police officer from the city coming to the hinterlands to investigate a suspicious death of a colonel, where he'd meet a young man who was born with horns.

Now, back to Minotaur Hotel. As the story progressed I decided to bring Oscar over from that idea to the Minotaur Hotel universe because it would be a very strong point in the story. That was a rather late decision, so introducing Oscar at the end made sense for the original draft. While translating it to the game, however, we saw that it was important to tweak with some things and that led to the conclusion that Oscar was too strong a concept to leave to the end of the story.

In choosing to bring Oscar into the story earlier (introduce him at the end of the first act and have him arrive at the end of the second) that gave us the opportunity to tell a story with it. It was actually important that we give him a solid story, and if we played our cards right we could construct it as an interlude to shake things up and keep the tension in the story moving.

We could also not give him that big of a story, of course, but in the end we went with it. This gave the chance to bring in the detective character too, who fit in like a glove once we gave him the backstory of descending from an ex-employee of the hotel.

All of this thinking happened over a few months, things weren't as perfectly structured as I'm making it sound like. However, to be more precise with the timeline of events... Back when we released the very first build of Minotaur Hotel I already had many of those ideas floating in my head, so much so that we were extremely deliberate with the decision of showing on-screen the passports you find before meeting Asterion. One of them is Brazilian, and that was already a way to foreshadow what we could do, maybe, if we felt like it was worth it later down the road.

Now, when it comes to the specifics of the Hinterlands itself like the plotlines and mysteries, that really only came much later. I figured it out as I went, actually. I actually do that a lot, lay a plan to follow but figure out the minor details as I go along, always trying to keep things thematically consistent.

You can't unlock him yet. Those are only placeholder assets.