安平 An-pêng

The war reaches Anping, in the city of Tainan. An emergency broadcast comes through on your phone. Everyone is to evacuate inland. You can't be bothered to go out, and you don't much like crowds, so you decide to stay in. Next morning you open your eyes and you're still alive. Outside the window everything is chaos. The power is out, and whatever was in the fridge has probably turned. That's where the game starts. There's no counterattack, no base to defend, no fighting your way out. What you have to do is far more ordinary: stay alive one more day, in an apartment with no electricity, on whatever you can turn up by going through drawers. This isn't a game about a hero. It's a game about the person who didn't leave — why they didn't, whether they still could, and how to get through the next few hours. There are only ever a few cards on screen Search, move, sleep, nap, check backpack, supplies here, codex — action cards of that kind. All you do is decide what the next stretch of time gets spent on. - Search — go through the room. There are cans in the kitchen cupboard, but you'll need to find the can opener first. Until then a can is just a sealed tin. - Move — walking from the bedroom to the bathroom takes a few minutes. Taking the stairs down from the fourteenth floor is another matter entirely. The lift doesn't work; there's no power. - Eat, drink, sleep — a salty can will leave you thirstier. Sleeping saves your game, and puts you through a whole night at your most vulnerable. Every action card spends in-game time, and how much it spends is decided by the thing itself — opening one drawer and descending fourteen flights of stairs are not the same errand. Time is the only genuinely scarce thing here. Your body will not wait for you. What you're up against isn't a who — it's eight numbers going down Health, fullness, thirst, energy, body temperature, injury, mood, hygiene. Each falls at its own pace, and none of them is a case of "higher is better": eating until you're stuffed is as much a problem as passing out from hunger. Every one of them has a comfortable range. The weather won't cooperate either. Full four-season simulation: the gap between day and night temperatures, rain that settles in for days, a typhoon that arrives without warning. Nobody gets to predict tomorrow. Whatever you wake up to is the weather you get. When it's cold, a down jacket is worth far more than a can of pineapple. Taiwanese Taiwanese is a language a great many people in Taiwan speak every day. Speaking it takes no thought; writing it down or reading it is where most people get stuck. There was a generation that was fined and made to wear a sign for speaking Taiwanese at school, and what survived that was the speaking, and only the speaking. This game's dialogue is written in Taiwanese Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ), a romanised orthography. Choose Taiwanese and you can pick a second language to run alongside it: POJ on top, the one you can read underneath. If you speak it but can't read it, you can match the sounds up as you play. If you don't speak it at all, you still know what you're reading. Supported languages: 繁體中文, English, 日本語, Deutsch, and Taiwanese (Pe̍h-ōe-jī). You decide who you are in the opening minutes At the moment you wash your face and look in the bathroom mirror — young / adult / older, male / female, six combinations. Different bodies start in different places. You get stronger after that, but only in the bluntest way: you train what you do. Carry more and you get stronger. Walk further and your stamina improves. Strength decides how much you can carry and whether you can shift that hand cart; stamina decides how tired the same task leaves you. No experience points. No skill tree. Only the things you have actually spent the last few days doing. What you can carry, and what you can't Supplies have weight, and you have two hands, one backpack, and perhaps a hand cart. What to take and what to leave behind is a trade-off you are forced into at every turn. An expired packet of curry is both a liquid food and an expired item. Whether you eat it is your call. That raincoat won't make you warm. What it guarantees is that you won't get soaked through — and being soaked makes your body temperature fall much faster. There is nobody to ask There are no NPCs in this game. From beginning to end, the only voice you hear is the protagonist talking to himself. Scattered through the rooms are codex fragments. Picking one up unlocks a codex entry — how this war got to where it is. The announcements, the notices, the days that were once entirely unremarkable. None of it affects whether you survive. You can go a whole playthrough without picking up a single one and still get through every day. But you will not meet another living person in this game, and the fragments are the only way you'll come to know any of them. Whether the protagonist stops to finish reading is itself part of who he is. About the name Anping is a district of Tainan, and the place where this story happens. Read its two characters the other way round and you get 平安 — safe, unharmed, having come through it. A place name that also happens to be a wish. An-pêng, set alongside the title, is how those two characters sound in Taiwanese, written in Pe̍h-ōe-jī. It isn't Mandarin romanisation; in Mandarin the same place is Anping. About the artwork The scenes start as photographs taken on location — the lanes of Anping, the stairwells, apartment courtyards. Each one is then worked over: removing things that shouldn't be in the frame, commercial branding, anything touching on someone's privacy, before being stylised into animation by AI. Every single one took a long time. Where development stands This is a project in development, currently made by one person. The core systems are running — time, weather, status resolution, supplies, story and quests are all in place. Early Access will take the game out of the flat: 20 new outdoor scenes and 5 new indoor ones, so you can actually get out of that building. One more thing worth saying plainly: the interface is currently all engine-default styling. Buttons, windows and lists have not been designed yet. The proper interface design will be done during Early Access. Early Access is planned for late 2026. “What was in the fridge has already gone off. A while longer won’t hurt.”