The command room of The Penumbra Directive gives you a world map, a cabinet of eight ministers and a 350-seat Parliament. But the design decision we are proudest of shows up on no screen: every run, one of your intelligence sources works for someone else.
Compromised from day one
There is no "trust" meter. Every run casts a network of codenamed assets with public track records, and one of them is a mole. Your information is tainted from the first tick, and the game never tells you who. Finding out — and accepting how much certainty you can ever really buy — is the game underneath the game. It was hard to resist adding a percentage: a percentage kills the paranoia.
A trust meter kills the paranoia. We took it out.
Seventy-nine systems, one pipeline
Underneath, seventy-nine living systems — politics, economy, military, media, diplomacy, intrigue — fold forward as one deterministic pipeline every tick. Seven visible indicators and a layer of hidden ones. A decision’s consequence can land instantly or three weeks later, with your name on it.
Eureka: the causality timeline
The problem with a system this dense is that the player gets lost: "why did my government fall?" The fix was to make deferred consequences name the decision that caused them. A causality timeline lets you take any crisis and trace it back to the press conference, decree or covert op that lit it. Suddenly the chaos has an author: you.
January 1992: the Cold War has ended and the order that legitimised your regime has gone with it. It is a work of fiction — real geography and institutions, invented people and politics — in development for Steam and Steam Deck (AppID 4736060).
D. ABELLÁN · FOUNDER · PRINCETON, IL · 2026.07.12