We Were Here Before

We Were Here Before is an interactive fiction game about a frontier settlement that is already, quietly, being forgotten. You are its governor. You have been here before. The Bureau has prepared a briefing.

It is closer to a Choose Your Own Adventure journey.  There are no deep mechanics to fill time, and no fail states where you lose.  It is designed for those with a love of reading, allowing leeway for the player’s imagination to fill in what the game doesn’t explicitly explain to you.

Each run will take 45 — 60 minutes.  With 90+ story endings, and four seen each play through, it creates a large replayable experience.

You will govern.

A frontier settlement needs decisions made. The Horizon pulses at the center of the table — when it breathes out, something arrives that no charter prepared you for. A merchant who knows what you ordered before you ordered it. A child who arrived three days before her mother did. An IOU for a name, found in a bag of odds and ends, that keeps coming back. You will read what arrived. You will make a choice. You will not be able to take it back.

You will build.

Every choice leaves something behind. Resources — bureaucracy, memory, prosperity, fragment — spill from the decisions you make and become the settlement’s foundation. Drop them on the grid and something rises. Frontier dwellings. A town square. A market. An archive. When a story concludes it hands you a Legacy District named for what you did: A Counting House. A Quiet Survey. The Certain Garden. Find it a place on the grid. What you built is what you governed.

You will compromise.

You will never see a stat. You will see consequences. Did you open the vault or seal it? Did you pay the debt or find the clause that made it unpayable? Did you tell the settler what was happening to them, or decide they were better off not knowing? The settlement remembers. The frontier remembers. The Bureau of Metaphysical & Philosophical Research has opinions about what you did and no jurisdiction to act on them.

You will be filed.

When the Horizon finishes its work, the Bureau of Frontier Settlement Assessment & Proposal Division issues Form 7-C — a bureaucratic obituary assembled from the specific choices you made, the districts you raised, and the governor you turned out to be. It is not a score. It is a document. It will reference things you forgot you decided. It will be more honest about you than you were. Read it, or don’t. It will be filed either way.

You have been here before.

The Horizon takes every settlement eventually. That is what it does. That is what it has always done. But something persists — a name you chose once, surfacing in a stranger’s mouth. A branch you closed, gleaming on the path you didn’t take. An echo from a settlement that ended, leaking back across the boundary. 24 story arcs. Over 120 possible endings. You will see four in a run. Each time you return you carry something the frontier left in you. Perhaps this time you will understand what the Horizon wants. Perhaps this time you will find the thing that makes it stop. The Bureau has its doubts. It has filed them accordingly.

Governance is the thing you do between arrival and the obituary. The Horizon is patient. It has been here longer than the Empire. It will be here after.