Upsilon Circuit - The Game You Can Only Play Once

 

 

Upsilon Circuit, a game that takes permadeath to the next level - perma-permadeath. Once you die, you'll never play the game again. Upsilon Circuit is an eight-player game that exists on one server, for several months. Once the game reaches several months, it will by design be gone forever.

 

It's a role-playing game where you can't upgrade your character, can't customize your character. However, the people watching can customize your character. The game is filled with monsters and traps; slaying monsters gives XP. But not for the player to use on skills, the watchers decide that. During a game session, one of the eight players will be selected to actually play the game. The other seven players become watchers and decide what to do with the XP the player earns. The watchers can either skill-up the player or they can place more traps and monsters around. Once the player dies, a random watcher will be selected. Watchers can earn karma to increase their chances of controlling the character.

 

Upsilon Circuit, developed by RobotLovesKitty, creators of the kick-started game Legend of Dungeon, have taken heavy influences from their past game and how other games handle permadeath. However, what the developer realised is that there is no real permadeath as such; you die and start over from scratch. They wanted to take it to the next level; how about never being able to play the game ever again? Perma-permadeath was born. Upsilon Circuit revolves around this idea, to give a real experience, like it matters.

 

"We've been thinking a lot about permadeath and permanence."

 

- Goble, RobotLovesKitty

 

"And consequence."

 

- Stolzer, RobotLovesKitty

 

They wanted to create something truly unique, they continued to add:

 

"Legend of Dungeon has a ton of that - You've got one life, you go down in the dungeon. When you die that's it. you start over. But that's not enough for us. We've been thinking about real consequences. Like, real consequence. Big time, meaningful game experience - putting the permanence in permadeath."

 

- RobotLovesKitty

 

To give the lowdown of how Upsilon Circuit will work, here it is. Upsilon Circuit takes place in a large world filled with puzzles and monsters. There's only one instance on its lone server. A maximum of eight people can log in at a time, and of those eight, only one is playing. Through what Goble described as "some network trickery," the game gets streamed from the server to anyone who wants to watch on the internet.

 

I think this is a very unique game idea, very fresh spin on the idea permadeath and that it really does make it matter. It is described as "mathetically impossible" to play the game a second time. However, my concern is that if this game is to be purchased from Steam or what not, and there is a single server with only eight players at a time, potentially some people will never, ever, get to play the game. Furthermore, they'd be paying a price for a one-time experience. Not even a pound or a single dollar would be worth the buy in my opinion. However, it is early days for the game and we will see how it turns out.

 

Very cool idea.