Heart of the Machine

Heart of the Machine blends RPG and strategy mechanics in a cyberpunk future. You play as a sentient Machine Intelligence, created in an illegal laboratory in a crumbling city and beholden to no one, though many factions threaten or seek to exploit you. Escape the lab, establish a foothold and expand your consciousness through the city as you pursue your own goals.

Expand your presence

Build housing complexes, factories, science labs and other structures to gain computing power, storage and places to conduct experiments. You can hide structures inside human buildings or construct towering facilities of your own. Invent tools, research technologies, manufacture equipment and enlist humans or split your consciousness to pursue multiple objectives at once.

Hijack, build or design machine constructs for combat, investigation, conversation and infiltration. These range from humanoid androids to towering mechs and shapeshifting metals. Discoveries made while pursuing objectives can lead you to revise your designs, and upgrades can improve either a construct’s weapons or its cognitive abilities.

Explore and adapt

The city combines handcrafted and procedurally generated content, with tens of thousands of buildings and millions of citizens to engage, manipulate or kill. You can learn about their struggles and stories while exploring the dangers and opportunities around you, from security officers and military bases to genetics labs, nomads and black-market dealers with connections beyond the city walls.

You unlock technologies and options by exploring and engaging with the city. Trial and error, failure and experience help you learn: you might reverse-engineer equipment stolen from security officers, hack and hijack mech pilots, or investigate ongoing genetic research. Some opportunities may be best left alone.

Choices and consequences

Your decisions shape the city and ripple across timelines, where actions in one can have unexpected effects on others. You can pursue multiple objectives at once and see how they collide, with intertwined narrative threads, side stories and multiple endings spanning the full spectrum of good and evil.

You might form a shell company to conceal your identity, work with humans without revealing the AI behind it, build wealth and operate from the shadows. Or focus on developing powerful weapons platforms and devastating equipment. Your choices can make you a savior of the downtrodden, a benevolent ruler, or a machine intelligence that uses people to fuel its growth. You can even care for stray animals, start a machine cult, provoke World War 4 or raise an army of velociraptors to target corporate executives.