Hope Despair Chaos

Hope Despair Chaos is a real-time social deduction game for 1 to 10 players. At the start of a game, each player receives a public Talent and a hidden Faction, with separate assignments: any Talent can belong to any Faction. Players investigate crimes, pursue their faction’s objective and use their abilities to shape the game.

Investigate and hide

When a player is killed, they leave an Encrypted Victim Message. You can investigate crime scenes with a flashlight, decrypt these messages and search for the true murder location. Real-time shadows let players hide themselves and bodies, while each personal flashlight has limited battery. Players can also find faction evidence scattered around the map and choose to burn or share it.

The 3D environments have room light switches and limited power hubs for charging lights. Players can vote to return safely to the waiting room without creating a new room, customize their player colors, and use voice chat. Each character has five customizable clothing slots; one copy of a clothing item is enough to wear it, and most clothing items can be traded or sold on the market.

Factions

Each player belongs to one Faction when a game begins, although some Talents can change a player’s Faction. The factions have different objectives:

• Symbols of Hope: Overthrow the Symbols of Despair. This is the good faction.
• Symbols of Despair: Overthrow the Symbols of Hope. This faction loses at the end and has Senior and Ultimate ranks, each of which gives players additional Talents.
• Symbols of Chaos: Get voted out.
• Chaos Slayer: Personally slay exactly one member of each of the Hope, Despair and Chaos factions.

Talents and room settings

Each player starts with one unique Talent that benefits all factions. Talents give players different ways to play, role-play and pursue a win. The available Talents are Talentless, Plumber, Assassin, Engineer, Scout, Bartender, Doctor, Streamer, Lawyer, Fashion Model, Runner and Dreamer. The Luck Talent is unavailable and under research.

The room host can customize the Talent pool, including setting it to Talentless so everyone has no Talent, or choosing a pool made up of one Talent, such as all Assassins or all Fashion Models. Hosts can also kick players, set an Entrance Test to filter for compatible players, and require premade names to manage the game environment.

Game modes

In the special mode for 2 or more players, everyone starts as a Symbol of Hope. The first players to finish all their tasks become Senior Symbols of Despair.