War came like a plague. Not quick. Not clean. It festered. It spread. It burned everything—the cities, the nations, the very idea that humanity could keep climbing higher. When the dust settled, there was no dust to settle. There was only ash. And silence.
Mankind was thrown backward. Not in years. In centuries. The knowledge, the infrastructure, the systems that held us together—all of it gone. The survivors clustered into villages, tribes, scavenger bands. Some found new purpose in the wastes. Others found only hunger.
Your village is one of the failing ones.
Winter is coming. The granaries are empty. And you've been chosen.
THE WEIGHT OF SELECTION
You weren't volunteered. You weren't conscripted. You were chosen. The elders studied you. The hunters watched you. Something in you marked you as different—capable, adaptable, or maybe just desperate enough to do what needs doing.
The task is impossible: venture into the wastes. Find other villages, other settlements, other survivors. Bring back food. Bring back tools. Bring back hope, if you can find it. Your people are dying. Not quickly, but inevitably. The math is simple and brutal.
They're betting everything on you.
The wastes are vast. The storms come without warning—walls of wind and rain that can bury you where you stand. The ruins of the old world still stand in places, twisted monuments to what we lost. Some settlements you find will have food to trade. Others will have weapons ready. Some survivors remember civilization. Others have already decided there's a better way—a way of taking instead of trading, of strength instead of cooperation.
And you have to decide who you are in that world.
THE CHOICES THAT DEFINE US
Will you be a scout? A trader? Someone who barks out offers and threats, who moves through the wastes with armor and steel, claiming what you need?
Will you be a diplomat? Building alliances, negotiating terms, learning that the communities scattered across the ruins have their own stories, their own pain, their own reasons for fear? Will you convince them that cooperation—that the old idea of civilization—might be worth reviving?
Or will you be a warlord?
Because the wastes have a way of corrupting ambition. Other villages have done it. Settlements that started out desperate, like yours, but somewhere along the way decided that taking was easier than trading. That fear was more reliable than trust. That the only way to survive was to make sure everyone else was afraid of you.
The game doesn't judge you for this. The world doesn't care about morality. It only cares about survival. But your village will care about what you become. And you will care about what they become because of your choices.
YOUR PEOPLE, YOUR BURDEN
Desolation is built on one core idea: your choices matter because people's lives depend on them. This isn't a game where you hunt for the "right answer." There is no right answer in a world of ash and survival.
You can bring your village into a network of communities working together to rebuild something better. You can establish dominance and rule through strength. You can trade, hustle, and navigate the gray zones between cooperation and conflict. You can chase rumors of a safe haven, a place where the old world wasn't destroyed. You can build a reputation—for mercy, for ruthlessness, for cunning, for honor.
Every choice reshapes your village. Every alliance changes the map. Every conflict opens new paths or closes them forever. The people you meet in the wastes have their own agency, their own fears, their own visions for what humanity could be.
Your village starts on the brink of collapse. But where it ends—that's determined by every decision you make in the wastes. Whether they survive is up to you. Whether they thrive is up to what kind of leader, diplomat, or tyrant you choose to become.
SURVIVAL OR CIVILIZATION?
Desolation asks a question that matters more now than it did before the world broke: What are we willing to do to survive? And after we survive, what are we willing to give up to make it mean something?
It's easy to be noble when your belly is full. It's easy to believe in cooperation when you're not watching your children starve. It's easy to reject violence as a solution when violence isn't your only option.
In Desolation, you don't have those luxuries. You have your village. You have the wastes. You have other survivors out there, each with their own impossible choices. And you have yourself—a person being forged in real time by every decision you make.
The world is broken. Civilization collapsed. Mankind was thrown back into the stone age. But that's not the story of Desolation.
The story is whether it climbs back out.
Desolation is in development now. We're building a world where your choices echo across the wastes, where alliances matter, where the line between survival and tyranny is thin and easy to cross.
The wastes are waiting. The choice is yours.
Will you help lead your people into a brighter future?
Or will you turn to warmongering like so many in the past?