Independent Polish game studio · Since 2011
We make games set somewhere between dream and nightmare. They can be unsettling, but we never want them to lose their beauty. If one of our games is remembered the way we remember the games we grew up with, that is enough for us.
Play across platforms
Our story · 2010–2026
We started in 2011 with an interactive book for children. Each project taught us something and pulled us toward stranger, darker games, all the way to Tormentum II. Making these games has helped us through some difficult years. It kept us moving forward, and at times the work itself felt a little like therapy.
Point‑and‑click adventure
Eleven years after the first Tormentum, we return to grotesque creatures, difficult choices and hand‑drawn nightmares. David is building a simulation so convincing that he can no longer tell it from reality. Then he wakes up inside it. When we began work, the artificial intelligence in the story still felt like science fiction. Eight years later, AI is part of everyday life, and the premise feels much closer to reality.
A new logo for OhNoo Studio
As our games grew darker, the old logo no longer felt like us. In 2025, we replaced it with a new mark that better reflects the worlds we create today.
Point‑and‑click adventure
TSIOQUE began with an ambitious goal: to make a game feel like a classic animated film, with hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation throughout. We made it with animator Alek Wasilewski and the team at Smile. Players helped fund the game on Kickstarter, and 95% of its Steam reviews are positive.
Interactive books · An unfinished chapter
2017 was a difficult year. We found ourselves at a crossroads: were we a studio making interactive storybooks for children, or a studio making games? There are only 24 hours in a day, and we could not keep following both paths.
By the end of that year, we had completed four more interactive books, but none of them ever saw the light of day. They are still sitting in the OhNoo freezer: an adventure drawn by Jakub Grochola, an animal fable by Dagmara Gąska, a woodland story by Agnieszka Kowalska, and a space story illustrated by Mateusz Herman.
All four had been written, illustrated, translated and animated by a small team, years before generative AI tools became commonplace. We know we let down the illustrators who gave so much to these projects, and we still hope to publish them one day.
Interactive storybook
When earthquakes shake Fox Island, Samar and Kala the hunter set out to find the cause. Illustrated by Piotr Foksowicz, Fox Tales spans 45 hand-drawn pages with narration, music and hidden details to discover. It was designed for children and parents to read and play together.
Interactive storybook
Bored with everyday life, Snot sets off across the galaxy and forgets all about his friend. Missing him, Fluff builds a rocket and goes looking for him. Illustrator Agata Karelus created its colorful cosmic world, drawing every scene herself.
Backed by players1,225 backers
Kickstarter · Animation funding
Animation was the heart of TSIOQUE, and also one of its greatest costs. Support from 1,225 backers let us pay the animators and keep the painstaking frame‑by‑frame work moving. It was essential, but it covered only part of the cost: by release, the total production budget had grown far beyond the campaign funds.
Point‑and‑click adventure
Tormentum: Dark Sorrow is a hand‑painted point‑and‑click adventure set somewhere between dream and nightmare. Inspired by H. R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, it combines unusual puzzles with moral choices that reshape both the journey and its ending. For us, it was a way out. We made it hoping it might free us from our corporate jobs. It did.
Backed by players441 backers
Indiegogo · Localization & print
When we launched the campaign, Tormentum had only a Polish version. Backers enabled us to prepare six more languages, along with a physical disc edition and a printed artbook. Without them, the game would have reached a much smaller audience.
Interactive storybook
Amelia and Terror of the Night was our first release, and perhaps the most important. The idea came to us when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPad. We immediately knew we wanted to create the most interactive storybook we possibly could for it. We poured an absurd amount of work into one small children's book: a hand‑drawn story about friendship, acceptance and courage, with hundreds of tiny animations hidden throughout its scenes. We had something to prove, to ourselves as much as anyone else.
The logo we started with
In 2011, we began work on an ambitious interactive storybook for children. That project became Amelia and Terror of the Night. We built our own engine, learned as we went and, once the work was truly under way, found ourselves chasing a much bigger dream: making games of our own. We knew it would not be easy. That feeling gave the studio its name: “Oh no, this won't be easy, but let's try anyway.” The logo above came with it and stayed with us for years.
The oldest surviving mark in our archive
We found this rough sketch among our oldest files. It may have been drawn in 2010, before the studio formally existed, or in the earliest days of 2011. We no longer know exactly when it was made, and at that point even the name was still only an idea. It is simply the oldest surviving trace of what would later become OhNoo Studio.
The studio
We began with hand‑drawn stories for children, including Amelia and Terror of the Night. Tormentum took us toward darker games and eventually became the series we are best known for.
Łukasz Rutkowski, Grzegorz Markowski and Piotr Ruszkowski founded OhNoo Studio in 2011. Their first goal was to make the most interactive children's storybook they could. That project became Amelia and Terror of the Night, released in 2012 with hand‑drawn art, narration, mini‑games and hundreds of tiny animations hidden throughout its scenes. It first found an audience on iOS and later came to Android. More than a decade later, we are still proud of how much we managed to fit into that first release.
Tormentum: Dark Sorrow grew from a different, older dream: to make a complete game of our own, from beginning to end. We drew on the games we grew up with, especially the Dark Seed series. Backed by players on Indiegogo and released in 2015, it carried our love of dark surrealism into a hand‑painted point‑and‑click adventure. It was also our Steam debut, back in the Greenlight era, when the community voted on which games would make it onto Steam. We miss that system. The community gave us a chance, and more than 90% of the game's Steam reviews are still positive.
TSIOQUE arrived in 2018. It was an enormous production for a studio our size, with 12 people working on it at its peak. We made it with animator Alek Wasilewski and the team at Smile, combining frame‑by‑frame animation and voice acting. Edward Harrison (Deus Ex: Breach) and Elle Kharitou composed an adaptive score that responds to the player's actions. Inspired by classics such as Dragon's Lair, it still holds a 95% positive rating on Steam.
After several years away, we returned to Tormentum. The core team behind Tormentum II now consists of Łukasz Rutkowski and Piotr Ruszkowski. We remain independent and still make the strange games we want to play ourselves. We have more ideas than time.
Illustrator · Co‑founder
He began drawing in the Commodore 64 demoscene and has favored darker imagery ever since. Tormentum began as a personal art project he worked on for years before it became a game. His first OhNoo project was the Tim Burton-inspired Amelia. With Tormentum, he could fully explore two long-standing influences: Beksiński and Giger.
Co‑founder · Animator, programmer & writer
His role changes by the day: animator on Monday, programmer on Tuesday, writer on Wednesday. He also writes dialogue, translates, tests and draws. Away from work, he is a father and an unapologetic geek with a deep love of comics, board games and pop culture. He sets the studio's pace and keeps us moving, even when the odds are against us. Amelia's message in our first game was simple: never give up. She might as well have been talking about him.
Press room
Press kits, screenshots and contact details for every OhNoo Studio release.
Contact OhNoo Studio
Need an interview, extra artwork, review materials or help with one of our games? Or perhaps you just want to say hello. Drop us a line. We answer every message ourselves. There’s no PR department here. It’s just us.
