Residual Breath Windows, Linux game

Public Demo to be launched sometime Spring-Summer 2023 2024!

Residual Breath will be a mission-based, Tactical Theatre Scenario Action first person shooter with immersive mechanics such as a diegetic user interface (information primarily conveyed through in-world elements and not a heads-up-display) and a HUD-free inventory. The game will also feature a unique take on player health by taking the common abstract percentage representation and supplanting it with a more stamina, or “Breath”, oriented system. Every action, injury, and stimulant will affect the player character’s Breath, and upon depletion the player character will be at a high risk of passing out. The consequences of passing out while away from camp will be left for gamers to discover for themselves.

Gamers will run in the boots of a potentially, soon-to-be "Stalker" on the second continent on the dark world of Obstratsky.

To maintain immersion, every action and activity will be dependent not only on their performance in each mission (or “Duty”), but also balancing their finances such as travel expenses, costs of maintaining equipment, medical coverage, purchasing ammunition, and repaying debts accrued when more is spent than what’s been saved. Progression comes in the form of equipment purchased and salvaged. No weapon or piece of gear is “level restricted” or “talent restricted”. Residual Breath’s closest system to commonplace “leveling” will be a Pay Grade system. Pay Grades act less like a sum of all experience points, and more akin to ranking systems in online competitive shooters. The player character can lose his current Pay Grade by a poor performance, though not necessarily by not “completing” a Duty. Pay Grades influence the Duties available for gamers to take up as well as the payouts upon completion.

While financial gain is an incentive, it is not the driving reason why the player character will struggle against the odds. The player character starts as a "Tourist", and not of the sight-seeing, travel-enjoying variety. Rather, the player character is like most tourists on the Big Aub being of the "crashed onto the planet" sort, and he is now in service to the stalkers who rescued him.

The player character will be employed for all manner of jobs. A majority of the work he will be tasked with will be surveying buried facilities for all sorts of tasks his more seasoned employers are too busy to handle themselves. The player character will be tasked with seizing lost classified government and corporate intelligence, as well as harvesting raw materials such as copper wire, steel salvage, hyper-fuels, radioisotope thermoelectric generators, and nuclear microreactors. His employers have their own political interests, and in the grand scheme of stalker affairs, the player is a useful and potentially valuable asset.

The game is not being designed for gamers to “complete” or “win” duties in every circumstance. The player will be pressured, by force of luck, to decide whether to risk pushing through to the end of the Duty, meeting every objective, or to cut their losses and get out of whatever hell-hole they stumbled into. To the stalkers employing the player, it is rarely a "total loss" if the Tourist comes back alive. As stalkers, they know from personal experience that it's sometimes better to pull out of a no-win scenario than to lose everything in fear of embarrassment.

The buried facilities on the second continent were presumed to be safer than their counterparts on the first. Stalkers know Obstratsky better than anyone in known inhabited space, and it is common knowledge that the second continent has been hostile to not just stalkers but any other effort to settle it. Only until recently has there been success at claiming and holding territory from preter- and hyper-natural forces.

The second continent does not need a "human hand" to be a violent and brutal place. Residual Breath aims to show this to the pain and entertainment of players.