Effulgence

Effulgence (2025) is an adventure game where you explore a world made entirely of symbols. Play involves exploring the planet to trade, travel and craft your way to favour with the locals. It stands out not only for being a game made of individual keyboard characters, but how each construction is made of the resources you must gather to craft what you need.

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You pick up fragments of a broadcast from a galaxy a million light-years away. To make sense of what you received, you must delve into the world of symbols to decode and assemble them into their original message. As you do, you discover the story of a strange world. It may no longer exist, as the signal has travelled for a million years. Or perhaps, as you fear, they are actually preparing an attack.

Play involves exploring this mysterious world to gather resources by breaking down the hostile characters and vehicles into their individual symbolic particles. You can then use these elements to print weapons, gear, and mechanisms.

The result is a game about the power of disassembly. Because you can see the specific characters that comprise every part of the world, it's an encounter where everything is judged by its constituent parts.

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Effulgence a year ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 12 days ago.