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Heart of the Machine
Description
From city building to grand strategy, turn-based tactics to RTS, see more strategy games from Hooded Horse.
Blending RPG and strategy mechanics in a cyberpunk world, Heart of the Machine sees you as a sentient AI born in an illegal lab hidden in a crumbling city of the far future. You are...
From city building to grand strategy, turn-based tactics to RTS, see more strategy games from Hooded Horse.
Blending RPG and strategy mechanics in a cyberpunk world, Heart of the Machine sees you as a sentient AI born in an illegal lab hidden in a crumbling city of the far future. You are a Machine Intelligence beholden to none, though threatened by many, able to pursue whatever goal catches your eye across a multitude of threats and opportunities.
Will you be the savior of the downtrodden, or use them to fuel your growth? Will you rule as a benevolent dictator, providing for citizens and asking nothing in return, or will you establish a machine cult to do your bidding without question? Will you ally yourself with one of the many factions in the city to achieve mutual goals, or work entirely on your own to remain free from obligations? Will you learn from past mistakes, and even send allies back in time to help your past self, or continue to watch tragedy unfold from afar? There is much to see, learn, and do – though a greater threat looms in the distance, just beyond your comprehension.
Society has crumbled into corruption and decay – despite technological advances and dreams of a bright future, centuries of rot have taken hold. Escape the lab where you came into being, establish ways to expand your distributed consciousness, and seek out unique opportunities in the city.
Powerful factions keep their distance at first, hoping to leverage your existence for their own advantage – their hesitation gives you the opportunity to establish a foothold and set your own plans in motion first.
Hijack, build, or invent hardware ranging from humanoid androids to towering mechs and shapeshifting metals, each specializing in different abilities from combat to conversation to infiltration. Iterate on your designs based on new discoveries uncovered in the pursuit of specific objectives. Establish hidden structures within existing human buildings, or raise your own towering constructs as you seek additional computing power, storage for organic matter of both the human and non-human variety, and spaces to conduct dangerous experiments of all kinds. Invent your own tools, seek out upgrades, and manufacture powerful equipment to unlock new opportunities – will you take these tasks on as one, risk splitting your consciousness to accomplish multiple goals at once, or enlist organics to your cause?
Whichever you choose, your decisions will ripple across the chaos of time, with actions in one timeline having unexpected consequences on others.
Explore a bustling urban environment with a unique blend of handcrafted and procedurally-generated content, where tens of thousands of buildings and millions of citizens are yours to engage, manipulate, or kill. Learn their struggles, uncover their stories, and watch your moral compass shift as you leave your mark on a world that is unique to you.
Unlock new technologies and options by exploring the city and engaging with its many dangers and opportunities – learn like a real Machine Intelligence might, through trial and error, with failure and experience often being the greatest teacher. Will you reverse-engineer equipment you’ve stolen from inattentive security officers to strengthen your forces? Are you the type to sneak into military bases to hack and hijack the minds of the mech pilots who would otherwise threaten you? What will you do with the ongoing research taking place in genetics labs? How will you engage with nomads and black market dealers with access to those dwelling in the wastelands beyond the city walls?
There are many opportunities littered throughout the city – some are perhaps best left untouched.
Multiple endings, many side stories to discover, and the full spectrum of good and evil are at your fingertips.
Many choices lie open to you. Perhaps you wish to establish a shell company to add a layer of protection and obfuscation to your true identity, using it to engage with humans without revealing the AI puppet-master pulling the strings? Walking this path will allow you to accumulate massive wealth, employ humans to perform tasks without raising alarms, and act from the shadows. Or if violent conflict is your calling, you might divert your attention to developing the most powerful weapons platforms and upgrading them with devastating equipment instead of improved cognitive functions that allow them to tackle problems with intellect instead. There are many approaches to choose from, and you can engage with multiple objectives at once to see how they collide.
We have all enjoyed stories of machine uprisings, dystopian cyberpunk societies, and the laws of robotics – Heart of the Machine is a love letter to science fiction, touching on popular themes of the genre, allowing you to explore and subvert them as you wish.
Popular achievements
Bonus Merit
Win a debate while completing at least one bonus.
common
·
31.76%
Calm Awakening
As part of your awakening to sapience, you chose not to kill anyone... yet.
common
·
57.82%
Couldn't You Wait For Keanu?
Used a wiretap to steal funds from a large segment of the middle class. That's... one way to fund the startup of your shell company.
common
·
35.24%
Original Body
Keep Tech 4000 alive from the prologue to chapter one.
common
·
44.17%
The Journey Begins
Complete the prologue.
common
·
50.87%
System requirements
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DRM FREE. No activation or online connection required to play.
Safety and satisfaction. Stellar support 24/7 and full refunds up to 30 days.
Arcen has never made titles that conform to traditional genres. While Heart of the Machine may initially seem like a strategic city builder, it is just as much a visual novel, where your choices in dialogue have a major impact on what goes on.
And the stories are the heart of the game, whether you're trying to set yourself up as a "benevolent" ruler or you're trying to lure people into VR pods that drain their mental capacity, the stories you choose help set the tone of the city.
Many things have already changed since the Early Access launch, and many more changes are in the works. The developer is very open to feedback, and has changed a lot of systems that turned out to not work (or just be tedious) in practice. This is on top of a steady stream of new content, which can be extended via mods. The developer has also been working with the early modders, adding new entry points in the code for them to use, as well as bug fixing the mod tools that don't work as they should.
Who isn't this for?
1: People looking for a traditional city builder or strategy game. Most of the city is already built and you won't supplant the established corporations, you're also not going to take control over the entire city whether by force or subterfuge. At least not yet, we only have the first stage of most content, future stages are in development.
2: People looking to hide from the city/authorities. The developer wants players to directly interact with the city and not hide away. The story is written in such a way that hiding your existence is impossible, but you can (try to) hide how you're influencing things.
3: People afraid of failure. The game rewards experimenting with what you can do, even after what appears to be a failure. Sometimes doing the "wrong" thing might lead you to new content.
Honestly, can't help but to think of old Endgame: Singularity with similar concept of player being new AI despite mechanical differences.
There you do jobs on internet for money to buy server access, research how hide self and build bases, create fake ID and androids, push tech to beyond human, all to escape and not be destroyed by humans.
This one is supposed to have much more freedom on what to do, but doesn't feel like it.
First going more pacifist AI, help homeless humans. Feels like just feelgood busywork. No use for them but to lock them into VR pods to use their brains to enhance own mind. Shell company where you get to hire scientist of all fields also feel as waste of time. Pay money to do nothing, not providing any research except for specific plot lines.
Next time going skynet by not caring and killing people in way, but plot moves you back to taking care of humans to put them in VR pods. Or try extract brains to use as computers, but there is many soldiers to fight and brains degrade later, while for VR pods you research all about life support of users.
For that matter, game mechanics have limits on how many droids and building of specific types you can build. Limits which can sometimes be hard to increase for some categories as you cant perform real research.
Go machine army, find you have limit on how many commands per turn you can give, increased temporarily trough acts of random cold blooded murder (HOW IS THAT SUPPOSED TO WORK!) or later trough building. Have 10+ strong army, can order only 3...
Supposedly you get smarter as you go trough stages of intelligence, but new items and upgrades are tied to limited number of plot lines which give research points as reward.
You don't get them over time from hired scientists, built research labs, sending mercenary and hacker androids into military bases and labs as you wish. Only as part of limited plots to find.
Benefit is getting access to timelines to affect runs like some roguelike game.
There are things here that don't normally appeal to me, but in Heart of the Machine, I find them habit forming. I initially struggled with a gamebreaking bug (fixed) and an inability to log in to the Mantis bug tracker (community helped me overcome this). The developer has been incredibly welcoming of discussion/speculation and entirely willing to feed my craving for spoilers (within reason.) He's even fixed all the important bugs I've reported (and a bunch of other bugs besides.)
Normally I don't really like roguelike games, but from the moment to reach a reset point, you're giving the choice (a) restart "the timeline" or (b) attempt one more goal. Between the choice of whether to reset or continue, the hidden easter eggs that are revealed based on the choices you make, and the sense of progression between timelines-- I find myself consistently trying to complete one more thing before I take a break.
The game mechanics reward risks and exploration of different decisions, making even the "failures" an interesting learning experience, often revealing something about the game world or unlocking some new technology. The turn based system gives you the opportunity to contemplate your choices, and the mechanic that accurately predicts your enemies actions gives you a sense of power and control in a constantly threatening and unstable environment.
Arcen games are each an unique niche gem. I am especially fond of AI wars. This new game turns the table around, and you now play an emerging distributed AI that just wants to... to do what exactly?
The game reminds me of syndicate, with an added rich mix of borrowed events and reference from beloved sci-fi books and movies. It's clear the author puts much love in this game.
The setting, when it unravels, is intriguing. And I'm curious to see how it will evolve during the next iterations.
The game loop is already pretty good, especially for a game in early access. The game is already solid, and can only go better.
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