Redshell is a cult of hackers bent on tearing down the peaceful and benevolent corporate sponsors who so generously provide us with steady employment, affordable housing, and as many as four hours per month of unencumbered free time to socialize at approved venues. They seek to destroy your way of life and shackle you to their ideals of 'liberty' and 'equality', demanding that you toil for their profit instead of ours. They know you want out. They want to help you. They want to save you from life-debts, from working yourself to death, from seeing your children stolen when every payday means you owe them more. It won't be easy. It won't be safe. But you'll be free. So what will it be? Do you want to see your life changed forever?
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Redshell, the game, is a semi-procedural, text-based hacking game. Steal secrets, ruin things, and work with other hackers to free people from CyberZone's oppression. Make friends and break enemies. Build specialized teams for extra-tough jobs and shells of anonymity to protect you as retaliation gets worse. Lose your friends. Lose your life. Start again, a bright-eyed new hacker in the same world.
You interact with the world through your console. In-depth syntax highlighting, completion, and help menus make sure you're never too lost, but you'll have to get creative and think on your feet to keep the corps off your back. Build teams with NPC hackers to accomplish more than you ever could alone, or become the one they try to recruit. Or both.
Failure is a part of life in Redshell, though.
To stay hidden, you need to get it right every time.
The corps only need one lucky break.
Sooner or later, they'll find you, and it'll mean a very final CONNECTION TERMINATED.
Death isn't the end of Redshell, though. A decentralized hacker collective doesn't rely on any one person, and new members are joining all the time. You'll find a new console waiting for you, ready to take you on a new adventure. But the world isn't new: you haven't started a new movement, just joined it as someone else. Meet and team up with the same characters, or do it completely differently. Then die again, and come back again.
Until the job is done.
Life under the Corporate Hegemony of Earth and Selene is about what you'd expect. Everyone and everything can be bought, for a price, but only a tiny number of people can afford anything at all. Most of the people on Earth work for CyberZone's manufacturing sector, under ever-increasing debts carefully calculated to never be paid off without quite falling afoul of what's left of interplanetary human rights law.
The few that don't work in manufacturing are the wealthy: the Stockholders, the Leadership, and the Contractors.
Things weren't so bad. Not that long ago, there were free governments, which worked to serve the people. Corporations existed, but they weren't all-powerful. The oldest generations still remember how it was, and their passed-down stories have fueled the resistance against the corporations. People still want to be free, and the only reliable way to fight back now is by beating CyberZone at its own game: Tech.
That was how Redshell started. It's passed around in hushed whispers and careful DMs. The seedier parts of the CyberNet, where you can find directions to unauthorized clinics and ration-token duplicators, can make a tempting offer. Learn some computer skills. Install this program. Hurt the corporation that's been hurting you all your life.
Behind the scenes, the Redshell software is incredibly complex. The collective keeps it updated against CyberZone's countermeasures -- always, somehow, just before those countermeasures can actually be deployed. It's available on every system, even single-purpose hardware that's supposed to be locked down.
The interface is a TUI with several tabs, which are revealed progressively during gameplay. When rendered to a GUI, the interface is still text-based; it's just rendered looking like a CRT. It has full keyboard-only navigation support, but also supports the mouse for typical mouse-related tasks, including text selection that's much more usable than usual.
All of the tabs share a common header, which displays useful information like the current time, the player's in-game handle, and some icons representing the connection status and whether or not the game has been detected as lagging. The header also of course includes the actual tabs.
On first launch or on creating a new save, the game starts with an introduction, which introduces the player to the world of Redshell and the basic controls of the game. In particular, it includes a (skippable) tutorial on the concept of command lines, which is the aspect most laypeople will be unfamiliar with.
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admin: this is the chatlog |
me: oh yeah? |
admin: yeah. |
admin: and down at the bottom, you see those? |
admin: the options. |
me: mhm. | 1 meg
admin: pick one of em. | + flkajsfa
> foo bar baz | admin
The chat is the main interface to the social part of the game. Through it you can talk to and trade with NPCs. Chats are strictly DMs, no group chats or channels.
The UI presents one chatlog at a time, as well as a list of your most recently chatting peers. There's an unread count per chat, and the total notif count is just the sum of all of those. You can select options in the current chat, if there are any, with the left and right arrows and enter. Scroll up and down in the chatlog with the up and down arrows. Change chats with ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab, like in a browser. You can also click on chat options or names to choose them, and scroll with the mouse wheel.