Paradise Pending
Paradise Pending is an original horror RPG with religious and philosophical themes: God has vanished after a corruption of the Deus.exe file, and the player sets out to find out why. Hadrian Ra designed the game and built its own engine, which gives the look of an ASCII roguelike the depth, light and atmosphere of a 3D world. It brings together game design, world building and engine programming in the hands of one person.
Role: Sole creator: game designer, engine programmer, writer and art director
Skills shown: game design, systems design, engine programming, world building, narrative design
About
Thou shalt choose thy fate by refusing it, and refuse thy choice by fulfilling it.
What started as a rather innocuous idea shortly morphed into a multi-limb mutant of somewhat unique gameplay and a deeply unsettling world.
The God, superordinate to your realm of being, has either thrown an error, been hacked, or simply didn't compile. Your goal is to find out what happened and restore the last uncorrupted version of Deus.exe, which is the executable on which depends the entirety of existence.
Paradise Pending is something between a horror survival puzzle game and a contemplative atmospheric experience brimming with religious and philosophical questions about free will, determinism, guilt, forgiveness and the paradoxical relationship between creation and destruction.
The stylistic choice of what looks like an ASCII roguelike for a religiously/philosophically-themed story might seem haphazard, but it's actually exercised to metaphorize the relationship between destiny (what the "code of reality" is supposed to contain) and free will (can we then make an indeterministic decision in such circumstances?), exploring heavily the idea of paradox being the truest expression of self-contradictory reality.
