DEAD RECKONING

THE LONG DRIFT

Demo out now on Steam Releases June 25, 2026 Also on itch.io Colony Sim Narrative Strategy Windows · Linux · macOS

A thousand colonists in cryo. One ship. A destination that may be fifty years out, or four hundred. You make the decisions that carry them — across generations who will never meet you, toward a world that may not be worth the arrival.

Dead Reckoning is a slow strategy-and-narrative game about drift — genetic, ideological, technological, and the gradual loss of knowledge — across a generational voyage. Every decision is defensible at the time you make it. The cost lands generations later, on people you'll never meet.

Manage food, power, and hull integrity through centuries of deep space. Crises, uprisings, and subsystem failures compound quietly into outcomes you can't take back. Five kinds of drift accumulate over the whole voyage, and none of them reset — so the faction holding the ship in year 200 was shaped by a choice some council made in year 40 and forgot.

There are sixteen ways the voyage can end: a colony that takes root, a hull that doesn't make it, a ship that turns for home, a crew that uploads itself rather than land. What finally arrives — if anything does — is the sum of everything you did and didn't do along the way. You may not recognize it.

Wishlist + play demo on Steam Also on itch.io Read the manual (PDF) Press kit

TRAILER

PLAY THE DEMO

Demo available now. Full release June 25, 2026.

FEATURES

Five kinds of drift

Genetic, ideological, reliance on the ship's AI, class division, and the slow loss of technical knowledge. Each accrues over the whole voyage. None of them reset.

Sixteen endings

Sixteen distinct ways the voyage resolves, from a colony established to total extinction to stranger terminals in between. The ending is read off your run, not picked from a menu.

Five-faction governance

Five factions contend for the ship, gaining and losing ground across generations. Who governs at arrival is the long product of decisions their ancestors made and forgot.

Six interdependent subsystems

Reactor, engine, bridge, cryo, life support, hull. Failures cascade through the dependency graph. A cryo failure wakes the sleeping majority, and everything downstream changes.

Land, then keep going

Reach a world and the game continues into the colony it becomes — a settlement you can pan and zoom into, alive with foot traffic and industry, or going dark as it fails.

A thousand people, not a sample

Every one of the 1,000 colonists is an individual — named, aged, given a role and a lineage. When the actuarial tables take someone, a specific named person is gone.

Centuries, not hours

The simulation runs on a generational clock. Colonists are born, age, and die in transit. Most of the people your decisions affect will never know you existed.

No combat, no clean win

Every choice has a defensible case and a cost. There's no optimal line and no victory screen; the open question is what the ship becomes.

CRT / terminal aesthetic

Phosphor green, teal accents, scanlines, pixel type — a callback to the mainframe-era future that never arrived. Five languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish.

Deterministic simulation

Seeded runs reproduce exactly, which makes post-mortems and shared stories possible. Hundreds of hand-written beats, plus the cascades that emerge from compounding system state.

SCREENSHOTS

Ship condition screen — the six subsystems hold while the Final Contact decision waits, year 38 — Year 38 — Final Contact, with the ship's six subsystems holding the line

A living colony map of 760 colonists on a temperate world, colony year 33 — Colony Year 33 — a living settlement of 760 takes root

Star chart navigation, plotting a route past the heliopause, year 38 — Year 38 — Star chart: a route out past the heliopause

Faction status — five factions contend for the ship, year 38 — Year 38 — Five factions contend for the ship

Colonist roster — 940 named colonists tracked individually, year 38 — Year 38 — 940 colonists, each named and tracked

Cultural drift corrupts the mission log text, year 92 — Year 92 — Cultural drift rewrites the log itself

Planetfall — descent pods drop toward a temperate dawn — Landfall — descent pods drop toward a temperate dawn

Ending — a thriving night-lit colony 100 years after landing — Ending — Colony established, 100 years on

Ending — towers and gardens beside an alien sea — Ending — a colony beside an alien sea

Ending — the Perpetual Voyage, a ship passing a world it will never make home — Ending — The Perpetual Voyage

Ending — First Contact, mission diverted — Ending — First Contact

Ending — Dead Drift, the vessel adrift past a ringed giant with crew zero — Ending — Dead Drift (Extinction)

THE MANUAL

The full in-universe manual is a captain's briefing: ship subsystems, drift mechanics, governance, research, and the long chain of consequence that runs the length of the voyage. Read it before you leave the system, or afterward, when you're trying to reconstruct what went wrong.

Open the manual (PDF) Download

PRESS & CONTACT

For review copies, press inquiries, and interviews:

[ press email — click to reveal ]

A compiled press kit — factsheet, features, history, quotes, capsule art, screenshots, logo — lives on its own page:

Open press kit