UNSPENT
From behind, a man at a cooking fire beside Maren; patched houses with lit windows, nightfall.

UNSPENT

Sixty years after the war, a man comes up out of the sea.

Play in your browser Mac, Windows, Linux

Free. A real-time game for keyboard and mouse.

The coast

The town on the coast went in the war. Then came the quiet, and the machines building out past the point. They do not look at the people in its ruins until somebody breaks their works; then the hunters come for the nearest roof.

One morning a man comes up out of the sea, and Maren, the fire-keeper, pulls him out. He makes a fire, a pick, and a knife that bites the gantry keeping the machines' yard. The Holdfast's last mercenaries were paid to wait for him.

Frames

Drawn by the game as you play it, nothing painted over.

A pale morning sky over the coast; a three-legged walker far off and a thin line rising into the sky.
First morning. A walker strides far off. A thread climbs the sky.
Over his shoulder at the water's edge: Maren with a rifle, the town's houses and a lighthouse behind.
Maren: “Nobody comes up out of the water.”
Over his shoulder on the grass above a beach; a black gantry on tracks stands on the shore behind him.
The Tide Reaper, past the point. Iron rings off it. Steel bites.
From above at dawn: a man wading in the surf off a sandy beach.
Dawn, in the surf. He does not remember the water.
Over his shoulder: flooded streets between ruined concrete towers.
The drowned city. Its old stops are twenty feet under now.
Dusk among dark pines: three of the crew stand with him by a stream.
The Holdfast’s camp at dusk. Rook: “We bring the hunters.”

What you do

A fire, a pick, a knife, a raft.

A reason to make

Maren wants the crew kept from her fire, and the crew pay for iron: so a fire before dark, charcoal off it, a pick, and the iron carried to their camp. Hunger, wet and lamp oil are counted the whole way.

The Tide Reaper

Past the point, a gantry on two tracks reaps the shore in rows; iron rings off its drum. A knife tempered in a kiln brings it down, or it is drawn onto the flats and sinks to its deck, and the yard's lights go out and stay out.

Raids that answer light

There is no raid timer: a holding is found by what it gives off, its lamplight, smoke and noise. The machine that reads it must carry the record home, and one put down on the road files nothing.

Across the water

A raft of driftwood, plate and rag takes him over the narrows to a drowned city, whose ferries still run to the timetable from before the water. On that shore the Covenant lives on what the machines leave, and keeps the war's archive.

Mended gear

Plate armour is spent by the blows it turns. At a bench it is patched with scrap and rag, or bound with tide iron off a felled harvester into mended plate, which turns more of each blow and lasts twice as many.

Download

Play here in the browser, or take it with you.

Browser

The newest build, the moment it lands. Chrome, Edge or Firefox.

Play now

macOS

Apple silicon and Intel.

Latest release

Windows

Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit.

Latest release

Linux

x86_64, with Vulkan drivers.

Latest release

Opening it on macOS

The Mac build is not yet signed with an Apple Developer ID, so the first time you open it macOS cannot check who made it.

  1. Open the zip. Move UNSPENT.app to Applications and open it. macOS refuses it once.
  2. Open System Settings, then Privacy & Security. Under Security it says UNSPENT was blocked. Choose Open Anyway and confirm.
  3. Or in Terminal: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/UNSPENT.app
Opening it on Windows

The Windows build is not yet code-signed, so SmartScreen does not know it.

  1. Unzip it and run UNSPENT.exe.
  2. If Windows says it protected your PC, choose More info, then Run anyway.
  3. With Smart App Control on, Windows blocks unsigned programs outright. Play in the browser instead.
Opening it on Linux
  1. Unzip it. If the file manager will not run it: chmod +x UNSPENT.x86_64
  2. Run ./UNSPENT.x86_64. It needs a Vulkan driver (Mesa, or your GPU vendor's).

Every build is checked to start on its own system before it is published. Your saves stay on your machine; the browser keeps its own.