Ablahshikar

Ablahshikar is a turn-based salvage-survival game set on an ASCII sea. You take command of a failing war-barge roaming the outer waters of Dastgerd, steering it through a terminal interface of murky charts and unreliable readouts.

Salvage the deep

You descend into midnight waters to strip wrecks on the seabed, or tear parts from hostile vessels. Graft the salvaged components onto your keel to rebuild your barge, including from the carcasses of larger craft. Foreign iron can resist your branding and snarl at your attempts to repair it.

Turn factions against each other

You face towering bastions and mercenary flotillas, and can use the waters’ hostility to your advantage. Deploy smoke to conceal your heading, send bird swarms to reveal unsuspecting targets, or lure rival armed factions into fighting each other. You can also send your crew, use bait, vent steam, burn decoys, jettison parts and make use of other tools and tactics. Crew can be crammed into hostile vessels to buy another watch, or you can surrender a limb in an unanesthetized offering to the Syzygy.

Unreliable instruments

Gauges can become obscured by green rot and vapor, with needles stuck in their casings. Strike the frame to make the scale reveal its information, then make decisions using readouts that may be corrupted. The game presents its navigation through text, ASCII matrices and the lore of attrition, with records in the Folios of Þal-Drayem tracking repeated lives and the crews lost in them.

Salvage and survival systems

• Turn-based salvage-survival on an ASCII sea.
• Harvest parts from wrecks and enemy vessels.
• Rebuild your war-barge from scavenged components.
• Use smoke, fire, bait, carrion flocks, hostile factions and other tools to manipulate encounters.
• Strike unreliable gauges and make decisions from corrupted readouts.
• Heavy industrial and deep-water acoustic soundscapes.