Bizarre but familiar

Imagine a universe where money talks, and as a result, gigantic corporations rule, trying to suck every penny out of you.

Large shipping corporations that want you to rely on them for every resource. Huge governments with little power. High-end brands that make you feel like you own the universe from your shoebox apartment in the middle of an asteroid.

Religions that give you a higher purpose in exchange for all your life savings. A fun and edgy social media network that makes you feel like you are on the right side of history with the low, low price of all your time in front of a screen.

In this universe, you are a pawn… but a "happy" one, with whatever you desire at your fingertips. What can possibly go wrong?

Yeah, don't answer that.

We wanted to make a game for people that enjoy a good story on the one hand and on the other the kind of hardcore players that only fixate on great gameplay (I'm a bit on the latter camp myself because good story games that I personally enjoy are hard to come by).

So we built this narrative for more casual players to follow, and if they need to, they can crank down the difficulty and enjoy themselves within that world. But at the same time, we will provide difficulty incentives (like the heat-system in Hades or the ascension system in Slay the Spire) for the guys that like progression in gameplay and a challenge.

But more than that, the design and the treatment of the world allow us to have fun making side comments about contemporary culture.

Now, with our universe in this distant future, for its denizens, we wanted to get away from just having humanoid characters. And to create a band of misfits in this already crazy universe requires us to think even further.

Brooding characters that didn't get hugged enough when they were growing up just don't seem like that big of a deal in a universe so large.

But for characters to remain relatable, they still have to show attributes that we as humans can understand. That's why we designed each of our main characters to represent a situation in our society.

From the problems in AI to animal rights, we've wanted to do what Star Trek did back in the days of Next Generation/ DS9/ Voyager.

The goal of our story is not to take sides on an issue but to encourage thinking about and analyzing scenarios — presenting both sides with enough emotional distance from the subject to prevent knee-jerk reactions that shut down the conversation completely.

Meanwhile, we've kept the focus on making our characters wacky enough to keep players engaged and having fun. We don't want to be preachy. After all, we play games to have a good time, not to be given a lecture.

Contrast — in this case, I guess, between external appearances and an underlying theme — is needed to make our characters more relatable, and to make a point, albeit in a cheeky way.

We've been teasing these oddballs online for a while. More in-depth introductions are in order. We're finally on our prelaunch(!!!) so switch on notifications for those. /B