The game is set deep, deep in to the future, on an earth that has become completely unrecognisable. After centuries of stagnation, Mars was colonised, first briefly in 2350, later more permenantly in 2470. Over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, mankind slowly makes its way through the solar system and beyond. Political turmoil and the climate crisis on earth is solved and reignited in ways which become more and more difficult for us as people living in the 21st century could understand. Through gene solicit and biomechanical augmentation, humanity becomes something very different. Verbal language as a means of primary communication becomes first outmoded, and later. Every individual not only is subsumed in a vast, interlinked collective, but in a world of biomechanically augmented individualism, where carefully cultivated perceptions vary wildly and vastly from one individual to another. Around the year 300,000, humanity is invaded by another lifeforms, and are quickly colonised, without any significant resistance. The alien is not physical but memetic. It pervades every aspect of what has become of humanities thoughts, ideologies, and concepts of individualism and collectivism. Through its influence, animals, humans, plants, locations, concepts, jokes, half remembered anecdotes, food, planets and emotions all become subsumed in to one interchangeable collection of syntagms. The game begins in what we would call 402,022, the 4021st century.
None of this is made clear to the player.
The game begins with a Greek chorus. A stage, bathed in red. The orchestra in the pit launches in to a sustained tremolo of strings, and the audience becomes silent. Three witches throw their hands to the heavens, and, they begin to start their explanation,which is delivered in a particularly oblique manner. However, to surmise:
In this memetically permeable world, all perception is dictated in agreement through an active feedback loop of communication between individuals. This game, and it's story takes the form of a videogame, in particular, the form of a Japanese role playing game from the late 20th century. Underneath the pixels and sprites are flesh and gristle and concepts and praxis (in 'reality' (the concept of 'reality' became obsolete at least 100000 years ago), there is no meaningful differentiation between humans and ideas and stories and concepts).
(the witches return throughout the story to further explain and confuse the story, just enough to keep it fun)
In this world, three ancient families struggle for power in three corners of the world. Their cultures are radically different and perhaps incompatible. In 400 years time, the world (that is, the huge bolus of theory and flesh that occupies both no space and vast space) will collapse. These three families must either murder one another or must reconcile their differences and will in to existance a new world, which is mutually beneficial to everyone.
While the game focuses heavily on RPG tropes, in particular it focuses on dungeons. The dungeon is, in this permutation of existence, in this manifestation of fabula, the primary ontology that exists. The various houses and kingdoms and concepts that live and work and breathe in the dungeon are shaped by the dungeon, its mazes and it's teleport tiles and its pits and poison zones. The dungeon has always existed (due to the properties of the memetic alien, such a concept can exist).
Because of the nature of the universe, characters are diverse and unusual. While they generally take then form of recognisable tropes within the genre, there exist
*A king who is a city, filled with intrigue, adventure, rumours and ports and taverns
*A queen who is followed by a chorus of narrators, young and old, who explicate certain events (and confound others)
*Batman, tired and oldest of all the superheroes, mithering away in his vast castle made of bats
*various concepts, including the Lacanian Real and the first ever map and ad based monetisation
*Half remembered gods and vehicles and holiday parks
Some characters will have televisions for heads, or will have vast speakers attached to their personage which blast out Straussian tone poems at hideous, intolerable volumes. Other characters will communicate exclusively through vast, screen filling Intertitles. Concepts related to role playing games are the most common, and there will be points where battle battered princesses will spit on the floor and curse the current level's midboss, and hit points and magic points are an accepted fact of life.
Basically there is every excuse to steal every narrative and aesthetic element from anything we admire and to sink it in a generic but hopefully fun rpg, with a weird fantasy twist.