The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox is a choice-driven narrative strategy game in which you guide up to 10 alien civilizations at once, acting as a galactic gardener rather than controlling a single faction. You shape their development across the ages as they survive, thrive, explore the galaxy and try to make contact with other life. Each play-through tells a different story and has its own ending.

Guide civilizations

Civilizations develop on their own, but you can influence them at crucial moments of social change. Each event offers three choices, and their consequences can shape a society across millennia. You balance technological progress, military aggression and resource use as civilizations develop from the Stone Age to technological singularity and beyond.

The game includes 400 civilization-development events, covering upheavals such as animal domestication, world wars, cloning and social revolutions, as well as apocalyptic floods and conscious interstellar warships. Choices shape societies’ histories and values, including their beliefs, views on sexuality and religion, and treatment of weaker members.

Life across the galaxy

The civilizations include many alien species, from deep-sea creatures to sapient plant-beings, as well as humans. Societies can develop on their home planets, in colonies or aboard generation ships, where life brings different challenges and special narrative events. You determine how they treat their own, what their first radio signals say, and what intentions they carry when they travel thousands of years between stars.

Radio signals may travel unnoticed for millennia, and the civilization that sent one may be gone before anyone receives it. A responding starship might arrive to find only ruins, while a distant colony may develop into a civilization light-years ahead of its home planet. The game also explores challenges associated with different technological ages, including nuclear war, climate catastrophe and murderous artificial intelligence.

Choices and outcomes

Your decisions can lead civilizations to unite, fight a galactic war or perish without learning that other life exists. The game follows the fragility of civilizations, the dangers of military power and the possibility of peace among intersecting cultures. Twitch audiences can vote on story choices through the game’s Twitch integration.

Soundtrack

An original electronic ambient soundtrack follows civilizations’ evolutionary steps and their spiritual, technological and energetic trajectories.