From one dormant spore to a living starship. Six stages, six kinds of game.
Stem Origins has its first builds on Google Play and the App Store (iPhone, iPad and Mac) and is in beta testing; nothing is in review yet and there is no date. The playtest list hears about it first.
You were made to destroy a world. You woke up on it instead.
Stem Origins is the story of the Stem, from a single dormant spore to a living ship that sails out of its solar system on the light of its star. Six stages, and every one of them is a different kind of game.
The Stem are not from here. Fern-like, spore-bearing, able to take any shape they like -- and made as a weapon, then left asleep on the world of Noform for thousands of years. They woke. They linked together into the Feed. Then they found the ruins of the people they had been made to destroy, and had to decide what to become.
Absorbing life is always the fast way, and the old programming says so out loud. Letting it live is slower. Every stage counts both -- life ABSORBED and life KEPT -- and the balance names what your Stem became: DIRECTIVE, BALANCE or CHERISH. That verdict buys a different advantage in the next stage, and the whole lineage is read back to you at the end. No path is locked, and the game never tells you which one was right.
DORMANT: steer a spore through the water and build the Feed's three molecules atom by atom -- a sugar unit (CH2O), a lipid link (CH2) and glycine (C2H5NO2), all real chemistry. HYPHA: grow a mycelium through the soil to three cracks in the surface before a drought withers the tips. FORM: build a body from six kinds of part, and meet Noform's creatures -- absorb them, or answer their spore-song and let them go.
FEED: tend the herds or harvest them, and wake five sleeping clusters of your own kind into the first Feed -- then go to the ruins. MIDRIB: spread a living network across a whole planet, and if its living variety falls too far, the Feed sickens with it. VANGUARD: raise a solar sail and ride the starlight out past the moon, through the ice ring and over the edge of the system, on real orbital mechanics.
Every new lineage wakes on a new Noform -- continents, seas, and twelve native species in a working ecology of growth, grazing and hunting. Take too many of one kind and it is gone for good. Finished stages ring the Lineage Hex on the title screen, and any of them can be played again as a memory.
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