Decade to begin in 2025 

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Unique time-traveling narrative adventure coming in February to Windows PC on Steam

The kind of world we leave for our children and their children can be a sobering thought, and the future is particularly bleak in solo developer Last Piscean's Decade. Fortunately, it also offers players a second chance (and third, and as many as you want) to go back and set things right. 

The world has been all but completely destroyed by a "metallic rain" that killed everything it touched. Emergency facilities were constructed to protect the youngest generation, but when even these deteriorated, thousands of children were left to venture out and try to survive. Most didn't, whether "the rain slaughtered them [or] they slaughtered each other." You and three other younger children you took into your care were the only ones who lived, seeking shelter in a "sophisticated bunker built deep into the side of a mountain." It too will fail in time, but there were enough self-sustaining resources to keep you going. Five years later, you've learned to operate a strange machine you found there that allows you to "send someone into the past, and retrieve them after they have spent ten years there." It'll be dangerous, and traumatic, as the "children" you send back will end up aging rapidly in your time as a result, but strategic use of this device is the only hope you – and mankind – has to correct its mistakes and avert disaster before it happens. 

While time travel to the past to save the present is a well-worn sci-fi trope, the way Decade handles the premise feels thoroughly unique. The presentation is a fairly bare-bones blend of interactive text and static images with an hour's worth of full-motion video clips depicting the "20 or so" different possible endings. There's a complex narrative with "a lot of reading" to do and choices to make, but the degree of puzzle-like strategizing involved makes it play out much differently than a typical visual novel. You'll always be picking from available choices, but it's up to you which child to send back (factoring in their own individual personalities) to which time period, and what you'll task them to do there.

It's your job to "investigate documents, technologies, and artefacts" they bring back, then use your newfound knowledge to "manage the children and their abilities as they age dramatically, and try to make the right decisions as you create multiple futures." You can decide to help or harm, "seed new movements, destroy others" and even "subvert the rise and fall of empires, art, ideologies, and individuals" as you see fit. The more you learn, the more you affect, the more alternate timelines you create and the possibilities expand exponentially. Changing a timeline "also shifts you and the bunker over to the end of this new timeline." At any time you can leave the bunker to experience your current reality first-hand, thus ending the game. It won't be easy to achieve the best possible outcome, though the game has been designed with replays in mind, encouraging new choices and different paths along the way.

While no firm release date has yet been announced, it'll certainly be this decade, as the game is nearing completion and tentatively scheduled for a Steam launch on Windows PC no later than February 2025. 

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