A Little Note About Order in Château Pluie

Hi everyone!

I wanted to write a little about one of the decisions behind Château Pluie, because I’ve seen some questions and feedback about why every bottle has such a specific place in the cellar.

When I designed the game, I could have made the sorting much simpler: find Spain, find Ruby, and then put the bottle anywhere inside that section.

But I didn’t want to do that.

I wanted every collection to have a place of its own.

So when you find something like SP – RU, you’ve only solved the first part. You know it belongs somewhere in the Spanish Ruby section, but you still have to discover which row belongs to that particular wine family. And once you find it, bottles 1–10 form that collection together.

I know that makes Château Pluie more demanding. Sometimes you have to look at the notebook, walk around, make a mistake, remember a shelf and slowly understand how the cellar was organized.

But that feeling of gradually learning the cellar was something I wanted from the beginning.

After enough time, I hoped you would stop seeing it as 26 shelves full of random bottles and start recognizing places. “I know where this family lives.” “I remember that section.” Almost as if you had actually been working there for a while.

That is also why I don’t want to remove the notebook from the experience. I have added the country flags after reading player feedback because I agree that simply finding France, Italy, Spain or Argentina shouldn’t be frustrating. But I still want there to be a little discovery left once you arrive there.

There is also another reason I made the system this way.

⚠️ Small spoiler about one of the four endings below.

If you’ve been paying close attention, you may have noticed a counter called “Rows?”

That isn’t a bug.

It exists because there is another idea about “order” hidden inside the game, and this one is much more personal to me.

I’ve always believed that order is different for everyone.

Something can look completely disorganized to one person and make perfect sense to somebody else. We all have our own way of arranging things, remembering where things belong and deciding what feels right.

So I thought: why should my organization of the cellar be the only possible answer?

You can take a complete family — for example IT – RU – Whisper of the Wind, bottles 1–10 — keep those ten bottles together, but decide that their row belongs somewhere completely different. Maybe you put that Italian collection in a row I originally intended for France. Or Spain. Or Argentina.

According to the organization I created, it is wrong.

But according to your organization, maybe it isn’t.

And the game knows the difference.

That is what the “Rows?” counter is there for, and following that idea can lead you toward one of the four endings.

In a way, I see the traditional solution as the harder challenge: discovering exactly how I imagined the cellar.

The other path is more flexible. You still have to create order and keep the families together, but you are allowed to decide what that order means.

You are no longer completing my cellar.

You are creating yours.

That ending is probably one of the most personal things I put into Château Pluie, so I wanted to explain a little about why the game works the way it does.

Thank you to everyone who has played, left feedback, found bugs, found plushies, hunted for coins, or simply spent some time inside the cellar.

Seeing people interpret the same space in completely different ways has actually made this part of the game even more meaningful to me.

Rainy ːer_heartː