Residual Blood Windows game

Residual Blood

is the first in a two-phase game project: it will be a public demonstration of gameplay and a thematic prologue for the main entry. The story-focused isometric shooter will feature gameplay whose challenges revolve around the player character’s everyman fragility and environmental adversaries that respond to the player’s choices in their attempt to explore and survive. The game will also feature light RPG elements such as basic dialogue trees and quests with alternate branches. Unlike other games that are said to include RPG elements, Residual Blood will use no leveling or skill system, taking inspiration of survival-horror titles such as STALKER. Instead, the skills involved are entirely the player’s own, with equipment, resource management, and preparation at “safe zones” being the means by which the player progressively augments their capabilities. Many mechanics will carry over in the subsequent main title and some may be tweaked during in-between development.

The Background Story:

It is 202X Recovered Era, and it has been decades since anyone has heard from the distant world, Obstratsky. No one knows what happened to the thirty or so colonies that were once active other than that any company that invested in their distant colonies would shut down due to sudden bouts of bad luck and the occasional act of a god or devil: entire boards dying of sudden causes within the span of a week, glitches in market algorithms resulting in catastrophic logistical and economic disasters, and even the occasional case of an apocalyptic plague wiping out entire corporate structures across constellations. However, optimistic pragmatism has guided stateless entrepreneurs past any superstition. Treading ground that even the most skeptical agnostics are hesitant to test, scavengers and their corporations set up forward operating bases while straddling the bare minimum to appease basic international law while also remaining committed to anarcho-capital.

You are one of these scavengers, and in the eyes of the masses across borders and boundaries, an internationally criminal entrepreneur. Public extranet databases, media archives, and archaeological academics have little to say about Obstratsky other than it being a classified site, off limits to those without proper authorization from the proper channels of authority, typically military and the select few corporations approved by their respective governments. These fact-checked sources agree that there is nothing there other than empty ruins in a toxic post-industrial wasteland. Any dissenter presenting alternative, self-sourced facts to argue against settled expert consensus is seen as a run-of-the-mill “conspiracy theorist,” or a useful idiot in the same vein as those following radical-wing and extremist causes. Those caught publicly discussing such alternative narratives without proactively denouncing them have been red-flagged by various legal systems as advocates for acts of political violence against international law. Many “Obscured Other Fanatics” (OOFs for short) have been sent to prison on suspicion of assisting in and supporting acts of international criminality.

No bribes or connections can win easy access to this forsaken world, a distant satellite of an unnamed system tossed to the margins of the historical record, a record taught and echoed by educators, academics, journalists, and state officials. If you know your history, if you have an education, you know that there is nothing on this world. Expert consensus as well as an abundant body of authoritative accounts and non-partisan evidence point only to the remains of rare-earth extraction colonies and wide-spread pollution. Said pollution has made the planet’s climate unstable and therefore it is closed off for the good of the international public. All material suggesting anything to the contrary has been thoroughly debunked in the public forum and its vocal promoters shamed or punished for advancing ponzi schemes, scamming the ignorant out of their money, promoting fake news and pseudo-research to the detriment of society at large, and sending the uneducated and the misinformed on wild goose chases and ultimately to their graves. It is not uncommon to read the occasional news story about grieving loved-ones and newly-erected memorials to fathers, uncles, brothers, daughters, and sons. In popular opinion, Obstratsky is a lifeless death trap only attractive to idiots with a masculinity crisis, or social failures with something to prove or compensate for. It’s not just rude, but politically insensitive and morally offensive to suggest that the dead planet could be anything but.

You are single and you had money. With research sourced from underground personalities and alternative media networks, you have assembled a portfolio of valuable colonial artifacts and technological assets—“holy grails” they are called—no one has claimed to have found (but many an anonymous poster on an extranet image-board have claim to have helped sell). With your own funds you have prepared yourself for a season-long hunt for these grails, signing up with one of the cheapest yet most reputable (by underground terms) scavenger corporations, Mercury. However, this is no simple iconoclastic archaeological adventure. Many anonymous posters have shared their first and second-hand accounts of dangers ranging from the expected to the cryptid, from the typical hazards of industrial ruins to the most bizarre of confrontations.

As is said in hidden circles, Obstratsky is not dead:

“Obstratsky lives.”