Portugues
Founder's Mercy
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About the game
Your people left Old Earth generations ago to live apart on a rotating space station, growing crops and keeping goats in its curved fields. The machines broke down, the animals died, and one by one everybody else left or passed away. Your father was the last, and that was a thousand days ago.
Founder's Mercy begins on the morning you finally decide to go. Somewhere out there are other people, and somewhere on this station there must be a way to reach them. Getting there means walking the ring of sectors you grew up in, from the forest and the church to the old hydroponics bay, and coaxing a few of the station's neglected systems back to life with the handheld scanner you always used for repairs.
It is a melancholy story, but not a cruel one: the author made sure the game cannot be put into an unwinnable state, so you are free to poke at everything.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the story starts in the player. Type a command after the >
prompt and press Enter. The game understands short English sentences, such as
open the hatch or put the module in the panel.
There is no north or south on a space station. You walk spinward and antispinward around the ring, and port and starboard towards its walls (when you face spinward, port is on your left). The status line at the top always lists the exits from where you stand.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
spinward (sw), antispinward (asw) |
walk to the next sector of the ring |
port (p), starboard, up, down, in, out |
the other directions, where there is something to reach |
exits |
list the ways out of the current place |
look (l) |
describe where you are again |
inventory (i) |
list what you are carrying |
examine (x) something |
look closer |
scanner, help |
the commands the scanner understands |
scanner, scan something |
ask the scanner what a machine is and what it holds |
hint |
a nudge that fits where you are; hints off turns them off |
about |
the author's notes and the credits |
save / restore |
keep your progress in this browser and load it back |
A few things worth knowing
The scanner talks back. You speak to it like a person, with a comma:
scanner, scan the panel. It tells you what kind of slot a machine has and how
much room is left, which is most of what you need to know.
Machines are built from modules. Much of the game is about finding the right parts around the station and fitting them into the right machine.
Gravity changes with height. The pylons climb from the ground to the hub of the station, and things get lighter the higher you go.
Credits and licence
Founder's Mercy was written by Thomas Insel for the Spring Thing 2019 festival of interactive fiction. It may be shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The cover art, adapted from a NASA illustration, is not mentioned in that notice, so it is not distributed here, and neither are the map and feelies that came with the festival release. The licence text is linked from this page.