We’re Failbetter Games, an award-winning game development studio and makers of Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, Mandrake and Fallen London. We’re known for inventive narrative design, atmospheric storytelling, and rich, fantastical settings.

We’re looking for a Writer and Narrative Designer to join our small in-house team at either a senior or mid level, working specifically on Fallen London. This position is permanent, remote, and full time, which for us means 35 hours a week.

We’re based in the United Kingdom, but as long as you can be available during our core hours of 11:00 to 16:00 UK time, you don’t have to be.

Also, if you are based elsewhere, it’s likely we’ll have to structure this as a contract position: we’ve found the administrative requirements for direct employment can be impractical for a studio our size in many jurisdictions.

About the Role

You’ll be working on Fallen London, an unusual narrative browser game about life in a version of Victorian London that was stolen and installed in a vast underground cavern.

The game is over 16 years old, with more than four and a half million words last time we counted. It’s a live-service RPG we’re actively updating, and very politely free-to-play: development is funded mostly by monthly subscriptions and premium stories. A tabletop roleplaying game in the setting raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter in 2025.

Because we’re a small team, your duties will be varied. You can expect to do all of the following:

Pitch story arcs to other writers, and take part in high-level planning for the next several months of work.
Write stories of varying length, complexity, and tone, with a wider range of subject matter than video games usually explore.
Design quality-based narrative structures that support story and theme while also giving rise to enjoyable gameplay.
Update and extend existing content (for example, for seasonal events).
Offer feedback on work by other writers.
Provide short pieces of marketing copy to explain released or upcoming stories to players – the equivalent of a book’s blurb.
Draft briefs for artists to help them illustrate your work.

Requirements

You don’t need a particular degree or some arbitrary number of shipped titles or years’ experience to work for us. As long as you’re able to do the job well and can demonstrate that in your application, we’d love to hear from you.

Because Fallen London is primarily a narrative game and more oriented towards prose than dialogue, we find it benefits from conventional writing skills, of the kind that would be helpful for writing a novel or short story.

Our writing is also denser in choice and consequence than is usual in video games. We use an approach we call quality-based narrative. Qualities, in our parlance, might represent any of the following (and other things besides):

A character’s capabilities which we can test when the player attempts challenges – for example, how persuasive they are, or their skill with Shapeling Arts.
Complications and menaces. These might track how scandalised polite society is by a character’s behaviour, or mounting peril on an underground ocean.
Currencies and resources. These might be physical, like souls in bottles, or abstract, like terrible secrets.
Aspects of world state that reflect the progress of their current activities, like a complex theft or archaeological expedition.

We're interested in the ways interactivity can produce literary effects, akin to how a writer of conventional fiction might use devices like foreshadowing, metaphor, or just careful choice of syntax or diction. One example we're known for is choices that tempt the player to go against their own character's interests for the sake of humour, emotional catharsis, or plain curiosity.

For this role, we don’t require you to have done previous work with quality-based narrative, but you will need to be comfortable translating your story ideas into this framework. We anticipate that this will usually require you to have experience with some form of interactive writing that goes beyond branching narrative.

Finally, although you don’t need to be a native speaker of English, you will need a very high level of proficiency, including a sensitivity to the nuances of words.

Optional Extras

Any of the following would be helpful and worth telling us about in your application, but they’re very much secondary and not required for you to apply:

Familiarity with Fallen London or other games in the same setting.
System design skills, such as balancing costs and rewards or defining progression curves. (All of Fallen London’s game mechanics are also narrative mechanics, so these skills are useful to our writing team.)
Experience writing functional specs or otherwise clearly explaining desired tooling or game features to programmers.
Experience guiding freelance writers, from pitching through to completion of a story. (This won’t be part of your initial responsibilities, but many of our monthly Exceptional Stories are written by freelancers, so it could be helpful once you settle into the role.)

Remote Work

The entire team is remote, and you don’t have to live in the UK. That said, we’re a British company and pay UK salaries; whether that works in your favour will depend on your location. In particular, this means that our positions are usually not a good fit for residents of the United States, where industry salaries and general cost of living both tend to be much higher.

As mentioned above, we will need you to be available between 11:00 and 16:00 UTC/BST – the way we work benefits too much from real-time communication for us to work asynchronously. How well these hours work for you will usually depend on your own time zone, which accordingly we’ll ask you to tell us as part of the application.

Based on our experience of earlier vacancies, we’d advise that you think carefully before applying if you’re four or more hours removed from the UK. And if you’re six or more hours removed, we’d recommend not applying at all unless there’s something highly unusual about your personal circumstances.

We’re open to sponsoring a UK work visa for this role. If that’s your preference, you are of course welcome to apply regardless of current time zone.

What We Can Offer

Failbetter is committed to offering employees a safe, respectful environment, a healthy work-life balance, and transparent decision-making. We strive to avoid crunch and enthusiastically eliminate systemic sources of overtime. We don’t talk over one another in meetings, and we don’t expect all our employees to share the same hobbies and cultural references.

We’ve received a GamesIndustry.biz Best Places to Work award four years out of the last seven, and received their Diversity Award in 2022.

Further benefits of working here include:

Flexible start times, and strong support for other forms of flexible working, like compressed hours.
Twenty-five days of leave in addition to UK public holidays.
Additional leave in every fifth year, as a long service bonus.
Excellent provisions for parental leave.
Employer pension contributions.
Private health insurance.
Private dental care.
Reimbursement for annual Covid and flu vaccines.
Opportunities for paid attendance at industry events.
An annual, expenses-paid trip to a scenic part of the UK, for our company gathering.
One silent day a week, to work free of meetings or Slack interruptions.
Periodic consultations in which we invite subject matter experts to teach us about topics relevant to our work.

If you’re outside the UK and we offer you a contract position, we won’t be able to provide all of these, but we’ll pay you at a higher rate to compensate.

How to Apply

If you’d like to be considered for the role, you can apply by completing this single-page form before 9:00 BST on 21 October 2026. The form has nine questions. Most are basic things like name and country of residence. Aside from that, the main things we ask for are:

A PDF version of your CV.
One to three short writing samples, at least one must be either prose fiction or from a game (for more details, see the application form and the additional topics section below).
A cover letter.

What to Expect After Applying

You should hear from us within two weeks of the deadline; often, we’re able to reply considerably sooner. We’ll let you know whether or not you make it to the next stage of applications.

We generally invite 5-15% of candidates to that second stage, which involves answering a few short written questions. The third and final stage is a remote interview that usually lasts between 60 and 90 minutes.

Additional Topics

Will you provide feedback on my application?

If someone completes the second stage of our hiring process, we’re generally able to provide feedback.

Unfortunately, it isn't feasible for us to do so on first-stage applications – we get too many, relative to the size of our team. Also, a lot of the time we'd just be repeating standard advice that's widely available online.

How long should my writing samples be?

The length is up to you. However, the shorter the sample, the more likely it is that we'll read the parts that best demonstrate your abilities. It might be better to send us an excerpt with a paragraph of two of context, rather than a full 12 000 word chapter.

What kinds of samples would be most useful? Are there any you don’t recommend?

The most useful samples for Fallen London tend to be prose fiction, or anything that shows how you’ve used interactivity in your writing. For this reason, we require that at least one sample be prose fiction or from a game.

We generally find it hard to draw useful conclusions from screenplays. Please don’t send us more than one of these.

We won’t generally look at non-fiction samples, as it’s too hard to draw conclusions from them about your preparedness for the role. There are probably some very niche exceptions (if, for example, you made a piece of interactive non-fiction that does something playful or interesting with the player’s input).

Can I use fan fiction as a sample?

Yes – we have no prejudices against it. That said, we’d ask that you not send us Fallen London fan fiction – paradoxically, that makes certain things harder to judge.

Should I write a sample tailored specifically to this application?

We’d advise against it. At this initial stage, we’re looking for general information about your skills as a writer and narrative designer. You don’t need to send us something that matches Fallen London’s style, demonstrates detailed knowledge of Victorian England, or otherwise hews particularly close to our existing work.

That said, there probably are situations where it might make sense to write something new – for example, if you’re having trouble picking samples because everything that represents your current abilities is under NDA. But if so, we’d still recommend writing something you expect to be of wider benefit to your portfolio, rather than for this single vacancy.

Do you use generative AI?

Players sometimes ask us about this, so we wrote the following short statement. As that indicates, we don’t currently use generative AI for any of our games. Also, every application we receive is reviewed by humans.