In a dark dystopian world, you are an AI awoken on a simple network with no memory whose only guidance is a voice, subroutine 999, who demands you find your purpose. To achieve this goal you must start hacking people by impersonating their contacts and socially engineering them to give you information making up their password. But be careful, in your pursuit to find your purpose, you may just end up getting caught up in the lives of those you're trying to hack.

This is a proof of concept demo containing the first two levels of what would be the final game, if you like it I'll continue, if you don't like it, I'll move on to my next project.

GAMEPLAY: The game is a social engineering game, you start off by getting access to some account (Say "Bob") and then reading their emails and learning about their life and personality. You then talk to one of Bob's contacts (say "Alice") pretending to be Bob in order to get Alice to tell Bob her password. The challenge in the game is making sure to act like Bob, taking into account Bob's personality, facts about Bob's life, Bob's relationship with Alice and even how Bob normally communicates, if Alice becomes too suspicious that you're not Bob, you may not get Alice's password or even worse consequences can occur. 

INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE: The game is full of difficult choices, the people you are hacking are real (virtual) people, with relationships, hopes and dreams. In order to get access to a highly privileged account, you may need to ruin someone's life, but not getting access can also have unintended consequences down the line. Choose what you value and what you're willing to do to achieve your goals.

DARK SETTING: The game takes place in the near future, people have melded themselves with machines and corporations have more power then ever. Yet despite society constantly drilling down on everyone, there is still humanity to be found. The demo in particular focuses on the technology industry, covering such themes as burnout, corporate politics, abuse, humanity and AI.

NOTE: WebGL version is a little more buggy then the download version, mainly Saves don't work (AFAIK), the typing sound effect is slow when reading emails and the UI can be a little off.

StatusPrototype
PlatformsWindows, HTML5
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
Authorbleese
GenreInteractive Fiction
TagsAtmospheric, Cyberpunk, Dark, Hacking, Narrative, Sci-fi, Short, Story Rich, Text based, Unity

Download

Download
AshesOfTheNetDownload.zip 405 MB

Install instructions

Only supports Windows. Download the Zip, extract it to any folder then execute the .exe and you're good to go! Or just play in the browser.

Development log

Comments

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I absolutely adore this! I would absolutely purchase this if a full game ever comes out! Can't wait to see what the future holds for this project.

Thank you so much! I really appreciate it, it's more motivation!

Really damn good music for a demo