Isyium

Isyium combines simulation, strategy and casual arcade play with an abridged story mode. Many years after Earth's bio destruction, you pilot the Spinnercast Module, a rusted, clunky apparatus racing around an orbital accelerator at near light speed. Your goal is to create Isyium, a theoretical particle that reverses the effects of Proxectron, the particle that caused Earth's disaster and was also created in an orbital accelerator.

Define Isyium

After discovering a casebook that details the process for defining Isyium, you run a simulant to build particles and record codes. Once you define eight codes, you solve a brief puzzle before uploading them to complete your mission.

From a viewport, you interact with particles to form new entities. You smash two atoms together, then combine their offspring particles to color the core. The core ejects them to one of eight positions in the outer group. At the end of a run, the game presents the resulting volumes. Completing all colors earns a competency, triggers an autosave and adds a code to the casebook's cover.

Manage each run

You choose how to combine particles and which threats to eliminate. Building many high-mass particles and their orbiting satellites can help you define larger, harder-to-achieve colors sooner. Keeping runs lean and eliminating threats early can make each run safer, but requires more runs overall.

Discontinuous Anomalies increase atomic velocities and the mass of resulting particles. Contiguous atomic hits also increase velocity, while earning Easer points and helping resist Vaporizing Rays. Antimatter Radicals can damage your module and end a run early, so destroying them is part of managing the central core's mass and your particle combinations.

Tools and music

The game includes over 40 original sci-fi electro compositions, with a runtime of more than 100 minutes. Its controls are easy to learn: you press a button when atoms collide. As your skill and competencies improve, the game offers deeper strategy.

The Spinnercast Module's dials and switches connect to tools described in the manual. These include Easers, earned to make targeting atomic hits easier; a Sight for aligning hits; a Resist-Vaporizing meter to impede a vaporizing event; and a Qenoscope for vanquishing Antimatter Radicals. You can also adjust internal lighting to favor tunnel imagery, choose spoken voice and continuous music, and switch on shuffle.