Aftergrowth

You wake on a road with a notebook, a hand-drawn map and nothing else.

The map is honest about which side of the road a town is on and vague about how far away it is, which is what a map drawn from memory is like. North is where somebody said it was.

Stay alive first. Hunger and thirst are the easy part. Warmth is the argument — night, rain, a river you waded rather than walked around, what you are wearing and whether anything is burning near you. A hot meal is the cheapest answer to a cold night there is, and a fire that nobody feeds goes out.

Then build something worth coming back to. Work up from your hands to a stone axe, to a workbench, to iron, to a forge and steel. Knowledge is researched or found written on a schematic rather than unlocked by levels. Raise walls that pick a face or an end-on view from their neighbours, so a sealed room looks sealed.

The threat is other people, and they keep count. Three factions hold the towns, and each keeps its own ledger of what you have done to it — provoke the Wardens and the Wardens come, and the Reapers stay where they were. Raiders hear you through anything and see you only in front of them. They arrive in parties that surround rather than queue, and they march on the camp you sleep in rather than on wherever you happen to be standing. A storm is cover, because weather masks noise and shortens sight for everybody.

Up to five, with nobody's address on the wire. Coop runs over Steam's relay network: you join through a friend's lobby, and no player in the session ever learns another's IP address. One persistent world per save, hosted by whoever started it.

The road east ends two ways. Neither of them is the good one.