Encased - Behind the Storyline

A new update for Encased looks at the origins of the storyline.

Encased Kickstarter Update #16: Behind the Storyline

There is almost certainly no game genre in which the storyline plays a greater role than in the RPG. The storyline creates the ground under the hero's feet, motivates his decision making, and drives a person from the safety of his Vault into a perilous quest for a water chip. In today’s update we will not simply relate Encased’s storyline, but also explore it, try to comprehend its origins, and imagine the place to which it will lead the player. We will also hear from people behind storyline development for the game.

loading...

The game takes place in the 1970’s, a decade with many similarities to our own history but with one tiny twist: the discovery of the Dome.

[... both helicopters from the search group were wrecked, only one crew member survived. He said that one of the vehicles allegedly crashed against an "invisible wall" and, falling, collided with the second helicopter.]

[... like the Bermuda Triangle, except that it’s not really a triangle. A sergeant broke his nose against this thing when they set up camp near the crash site.]

[...an unpleasant surprise. Yes, the parachutes opened and our people successfully descended into the Dome. It's not even that one of them died in a gravity anomaly: this is a calculated risk, we also lost robots this way. But who could have guessed that the dome is semi-permeable and our people won’t be able to come back out?]

  ***

Why the 1970’s? Because the 70’s were a highly controversial period around the world, and many of the conflicts of that time end up reflected in the world under the Dome. Within the confines of this mysterious anomaly, the details begin to look a little bit... different.

The Dome is the major enigma of the world of Encased. An enormous, artificially engineered structure, with a vast network of underground facilities, full of sentient machines, traps and weird gizmos, the ultimate purpose of which the player will have to decipher on his own. This otherworldly artifact is the foundation of the main storyline, which sets the tone and background for the entire narrative.

But all this comes much later. In its initial stages, the conquest of the Dome was an unqualified success. Naturally, an undertaking of this size and complexity could not come to be without financing. The organization both backing and implementing the research, the CRONUS Foundation, recouped their investment by auctioning, on a global scale, some of the fantastic relics and technologies recovered from the Dome.

As the wealth of CRONUS grew, so did its political influence: as the brainchild of the world political elite, the foundation employed lobbyists around the world to promote its interests.

***

[...]