Dean Moynihan Announces O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT
The survival game, about carrying a cursed artifact across a ruined medieval continent, is wishlist-stage on Steam with no release date.
Dean Moynihan, who releases work as Awkward Silence Games, has put up a Steam page and itch.io site for O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT, a survival game in development. A lone traveler carries a cursed artifact on foot across an abandoned medieval continent. There is no release date yet. Watch the teaser below.
The teaser for O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT, trimmed; the full version with sound is on Steam. Video: Dean Moynihan / Awkward Silence Games
The page opens on four lines of setup: the rapture came and went, and those left behind grow sick and scavenge in the wreckage. Play centers on travel rather than combat. The traveler manages stamina and scarce supplies across ruins, roads and empty settlements, and progress is counted in distance covered, resources secured and endurance. The artifact, the page says, "may influence movement and decision-making, becoming increasingly difficult to carry." Story arrives through the environment and rare encounters, with little dialogue. Moynihan cites slow cinema, low fantasy and mythic allegory as the sources of its bleak, contemplative tone, and the art is minimal pixel and bitmap work.
The Steam listing is single-player and in English, with Windows system requirements and a mature content advisory. The game's itch.io page, under the Awkward Silence Games account, lists an average session of about an hour and states that no generative AI was used in making it.
For more reading, see Killscreen on The Flame in the Flood, the game's itch.io page.
Screenshots from O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT. Images: Dean Moynihan / Awkward Silence Games
Slow, authored survival games like this one rarely get written up anywhere. Killscreen's free newsletter finds the work at the edges of games, twice a week.
