Project Serial is a deckbuilding roguelike interactive story text-based RPG that takes place in a deranged, lawless city filled with gangs and psychopaths. You are The Loner, and your job is to traverse the violent nights one street at a time to reach your target destination. Once there, you reveal your true self; a manipulative and merciless serial killer ready to slaughter everyone in the room.
Adopt your own rhetoric
Everyone here has their reason for violence. Survival? Reaction? Curiosity? Enjoyment? Whatever it is, it's your choice, and you can choose how to handle the dire situations set before you. With every decision, you prioritize reason, ethics, amusement, or something else entirely, all of which will improve your skills to reveal more about the world around you and alter your approach in combat. Explore your psyche and choose the rhetoric that fits your playstyle.
City exploration
As you stalk the streets, you will encounter various situations, each randomly generated and containing multiple outcomes. Your skills will offer up observations and hints, after which you will input a single keyword to describe your intentions. Will you threaten or appease gang members? Will you distract or hide from psychopaths? Will you spare or kill a dying man? Each action has its own result, its own reward, or its own punishment. How will you survive?
Turn-based card combat
Your actions while exploring will boost your skills and grant you cards. These cards are then used in turn-based combat as you fight groups of thugs. Punch, Kick, Grapple, Block, Talk, Surrender: the names of each card describe the action you take and adhere to the rhetoric skill you've adopted. But be wary of your wrath, too much carnage raises urgency, boosting your enemy's capabilities. Instead, manipulate your victims and kill them softly to maintain control.
Interactive story
The story of Project Serial is yours to create. You input single words to influence your role in the story and change the outcome of each situation. Every input is yours to freely decide, and careful observation of the world may reveal hidden keywords for story progression. But you are not alone, your skills will help you with keywords to enact their rhetoric. There are many secrets to this city, and different skillsets will provide you with new perspectives.
City Secrets
What happened to this city? A once prosperous and peaceful paradise has eroded into madness and slaughter. The city's population has dropped to a quarter, all law and order has been abandoned, corpses are strung about, only maniacs and violent psychopaths inhabit these concrete walls. You don't know much but you do know this, the people's eyes are bleeding and something unseen lurks the streets.
*Project Serial is made by humans, not A.I.
