Jason Rohrer, he behind RPS favourites The Castle Doctrine, Cordial Minuet, and Sleep Is Death, has his new recreation out at the moment – One Hour One Life. And this time he’s taking over, effectively, all of humanity?
The premise behind One Hour One Life, introduced in 2016, is that you simply play, and also you’ll by no means guess, a personality for one hour that represents their complete life. And so will everybody else. A shared persistent server, by which each particular person taking part in sees a personality by their sixty yr lifetime, one minute per yr.
Born into the world as a child, for the primary couple of minutes you’ll be fully dependent upon different gamers taking part in as your mother and father, however then shortly develop up, have kids of your personal, and possibly even grandkids, and alongside the best way attempt to develop, construct and advance society in your personal small approach. After your character’s hour is up, you’ll hopefully have left a legacy, whether or not its additional generations, or your small contribution to the furthering of society. It’s all higher defined on this video:
The thought seems to be to create a spot by which gamers are pushed towards altruism, figuring out that what they’re engaged on, the results of their taking part in, will seemingly by no means profit their character, however fairly later generations. And Rohrer has grand ambitions for these generations, the sport supposed to evolve over many weeks. The recreation’s tech tree, says Rohrer, will take “hundreds of generations to explore.” In the meantime, every character you play goes to should eat, discover, and never get killed, whether or not that’s by rampaging wild animals or laser-wielding robots.
Which all sounds a really fascinating idea, though one that’s going to be very depending on not solely a big uptake, but additionally individuals sticking round with the sport for weeks to come back. Which is one thing Rohrer’s making much more troublesome for himself by distributing the sport solely via his own site, and never through Itch, GOG, Steam, Humble… It additionally sounds enormously heteronormative, and together with that, extraordinarily targeted on the notion of breeding for validity. It’ll be good to see if the sport when launched permits gamers to choose out of that cycle and focus elsewhere. I suppose we will see.
It’s $20 to seek out out, as I say, solely through the game’s site, which appears a daring selection. We’ll seemingly get again to you with extra ideas once we’ve performed it.
