The God Curse is an open ended narrative game about questioning your morality through the use of a supernatural gift that allows you to heal people with one hand and pass on their burdens with another. The objective of the game is to make the player determine how they would use a superpower limited by their human capabilities, and within those limitations, determine who ethically deserves to live and die. With enough focus, the player can even resurrect the dead by passing on death itself to another, but this is not an easy feat.
With one hand, the player can create a beam of energy that alleviates people of their wounds and diseases, but the process means that you are not nullifying the conditions, rather you are transferring them onto someone else. In other words, for every person you heal, you have to condemn another person to the negative afflictions, which by choice could be yourself or someone else. Whenever you heal people you significantly drain your capacity to do so again for a time, meaning that unless you want to die, your healing abilities have to be conserved.
People know about your gift, well enough for people to approach you with offers to use you like a service, well enough for people to plead with you to help their loved ones, well enough for people to tell you who they think deserves to live and die. Certainly well enough for them to condemn your every choice at one turn or another.
Features:
UmberSanct is a Real Time Strategy game about managing the last human civilization. You play a powerful godlike deity tasked with guarding the last people on earth from the dangers of a post apocalyptic world, but also each other. In times of crisis, people are often their own greatest enemies, influenced by strong feelings of worthlessness anxiety and depression, for others their survival instincts kick in, and people begin to turn on each other to guarantee their own longevity above everyone elses.
Death is the worst thing that can occur right now, as the population has shrunk to extreme lows making every last person valuable and entirely necessary in the survival of their species, you cannot afford to lose anyone else. Death will not only lower the population, but its influence will also lower the morale of the living, raising sadness and anger, and in extreme cases lead to mass suicides and other atrocities.
To keep the species alive after great turmoil, you must defend them from themselves. There are two major ways you can do this and both carry benefits and consequences; you can choose to subtly influence situations as conflicts and negative circumstances arise, or you can blow subtlety out of the water entirely and reveal yourself as a divine god to the people and directly intervene in their conflictions.
Become the God you want to be:
- Choosing to remain hidden means that your options to change the world are less extensive as you will have to attribute your actions to natural circumstances and coincidence, silently manipulating the world while free will reigns. Mass murders and other extremities will most likely occur under your watch as you try to do good and retain morale, but you will have the power to change anything that can be plausibly denied from being related to your intervention. With your success, this approach allows people to find their own resolutions to conflicts over time, increasing their independence and taking pressure off of you and your responsibilities.
- Revealing yourself allows for extremely direct approaches to events as an ethereal dictator and savior, curing diseases, stopping crimes poverty and rebellions are only some of the possibilities. People however will become extremely dependent on your blessings and will eventually forget what the world was like without you, and many ills that may occur under your watch will be attributed to you as your personal failures. Many of your faithful servants will be militant in their devotion to you, murdering apostates and those who would rebel against your controversial decisions and constant meddling, leading to more death and division. While you will be able to abandon the world and hide among the stars again, people will think that you have forsaken them, and they will lose faith in you and themselves. Those that don't lose faith will go to extreme lengths to prove their worth to you once more in their hopes to see you again, and that is rarely a good thing.
