The Ruins Still Obey
- story-driven
- Difficulty: intermediate
- About 1800 min
- solo
- Game Systems: Special Movement (New), Ambient Audio (Live), Dynamic Portraits (Live), World Map (Live), NPC Possession (Live), Attachment Slots (Live)
- dark-science-fantasy
- political-drama
- conversation-led
- no-combat
- body-horror
- three-inheritances
What you do
You arrive in a valley ruled by the three heroes who saved it decades ago without asking. You carry one of the powers that changed it: inhabiting another body, flight, or implants. Inspect what the old systems left behind, repair and salvage the ruins, and question, persuade or pressure the people living under the three rulers. Everyone wants your power aimed at someone, and you decide who holds the valley. Nobody can be killed here.
Three heroes saved this valley decades ago, unasked. Each rules a domain. In Draskell all agree: a queue turns its heads as one and means it. Whole heals all, asked or not. Its mist seals a man's arm before he pulls back; he thanks it, mouth still shaping no. Entire is a city that became a person. Its brass desk reads your tag aloud: organ or growth. You bring one of the powers that broke the place. Everyone wants it aimed at someone. Nobody dies here. They are taken apart where they stand.
Plays in a web browser on a desktop or laptop computer.
Free to start, no card needed: 50 Embers on sign-up (approx 1 hour sample of standard play, estimate based on typical story play), then 15 a day.
Early Access
The Road In
Something Already Asked
You did not come here to be read, but in this valley it happens to almost everyone. Sooner or later, something here reads you.
Three People Saved This Country
They did it decades ago, and none of them asked first. One took away an enemy city's wish to fight, and the war stopped that afternoon. That city has not been able to defend itself since. One put a healing swarm into the air, and every wound under it closed. His people have not been free to stop their own treatment since. One took the water, the roads and the hospitals for an emergency nobody has declared over, and gave none of it back. They were the heroes. They are the government. A stone slab stands in a swept square. Its front carries the saved, name by name. Its back carries the people the weather killed, by number.
They Are All Still Working
In Draskell, the queue ahead of you is calm and well fed. At some point every head in it will turn at once, for the same reason, and none of them will think it odd. At the border of Whole, a white healing mist stands a hand deep over swept stone and stops at a painted line. It will seal a cut on you before you have finished deciding whether you want it sealed. Entire is a city that thinks of itself as one living body. Its desk reads your tag aloud and says what you are to it, organ or growth. The queue hears it at the same moment you do.
You Are Carrying One of Them
Not their office, but their kind of power. You carry a small, private version of it, which got into a body during the worst year this world has had. This is your inheritance. With Inhabit, you wear a face that is not yours, and it holds while you wear it. With Flight, the ground lets go of you. With Augment Integration, your body is rebuilt out of the wreck. You get exactly one, for good. Everyone who matters here will work out which one you have. Then they will start thinking what they would do with it.
Find out what this valley does with what it learns about you.
What Awaits
- Three rulers, each working, sincere, and impossible to simply beat.
- One inheritance, chosen once and never traded, that changes every door in the valley.
- Eighty-five adults with their own reasons, a few of them struck off a list while you watch.
- Highfield, a freehold no ruler holds, which stays free because it issues the only money all three take.
- Four ways this valley can end, and you will see one of them.
Content notes
Contains: minds rewritten so that an order feels like a wish of your own, and whole districts coordinated that way. Medical treatment given to people who said no. That includes a decision, taken at a desk, about whether a patient's body may carry a child. The clerk who reads it out is neither cruel nor warm. Bodies altered, sealed and classified without consent. Lifelong dependence on a treatment that can be withdrawn at a table. Psychological domination and inherited compulsion. Predation and bodily harm. Mass and individual death in the world's history. The permanent ruin of named adults during play, which nothing later undoes. Romance and intimacy with rulers who are dangerous and are not redeemed by it. Betrayal. The option of working knowingly with any of it.