Asciident

Asciident is an open-world sci-fi role-playing game with a unique visual style entirely composed of text characters, creating a retro text-mode aesthetic. Set in a futuristic universe, players explore various locations such as transport ships, alien planets, and space anomalies. The game blends RPG elements with platforming and survival mechanics, offering a sandbox experience where players can pilot spacecraft and navigate through an interactive fiction narrative.

Asciident: A Monument to Minimalism Lost in the Stars

In the vast cosmos of indie game development, where retro aesthetics are often a shortcut to nostalgia, a title emerges that demands to be taken at face value. It is not merely retro; it is a deliberate, almost archaeological, reconstruction of a visual language predating graphical sprites. Asciident, from developer Andrey Fomin and Puzzle Lab, is a bold experiment—a side-scrolling, open-world sci-fi RPG where every visual element is crafted solely from the characters of the ASCII table. It is a game of profound ambition and stark contradiction, a title that launched into Early Access with a universe of promise but, according to its own developer, delivered only a fraction of its vision before fading into an uncertain stasis.

Development History & Context

Asciident is the brainchild of Lithuanian developer Andrey Fomin, operating under the banner UAB Puzzle Lab and published by Black Maple Games. Its release on March 18, 2020, placed it squarely in an era where indie development was flourishing, yet its core concept was a deliberate throwback to a primordial era of computing.

Fomin’s vision was not merely to create a text-based adventure but to harness the ASCII character set (specifically characters 32 to 126) to build a living, breathing, side-scrolling world. This was a technical and artistic gambit. The technological constraint was self-imposed: to eschew modern graphics pipelines entirely and render a game world—from characters and creatures to landscapes and items—using only the symbols available on a keyboard. This approach harkens back to the mainframe era of games like Rogue (1980) and its countless progenies, but Asciident aimed to transcend the dungeon crawl. It proposed a open-world sci-fi saga, a “Metroidvania with RPG elements” as noted by one early player, built from the very building blocks of code.

The game entered Steam Early Access with a clear, community-focused development plan. Fomin stated his intent was to “communicate with you to improve the game,” with a roadmap that promised new locations like the “Big Transport Ship” and “Hummingbird Planet” every month or two, culminating in a final release by mid-2020. This was a development model built on transparency and iterative growth, a promise to build a galaxy one ASCII asteroid at a time.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The narrative foundation of Asciident is the sci-fi novel “Frango Anomaly.” Players assume the role of a human clone, a blank slate who has managed a desperate escape from the clutches of space pirates. This protagonist crashes onto the partially abandoned Asteroid FA-17, a location colonized millennia prior for its valuable crystals.

The setting is rich with implied lore and a palpable sense of decline. The asteroid is a testament to cosmic capitalism; mining persists, but only because its location serves as a convenient transshipment base. With crystal prices plummeting, entire sectors have been left to decay, creating a frontier where the rules of civilization have broken down. “Life here moves at its own pace and by its own rules,” the official description notes, ominously adding that some neutral characters “can become hostile.”

This premise taps into classic sci-fi themes: identity (as a clone), survival against ecological and economic desolation, and the mystery of abandoned places. The player is an outsider, a fugitive with no past, tasked with navigating a world that is both physically and socially hazardous. The potential for a deep, emergent narrative was baked into the premise, waiting to be fleshed out through interactions with NPCs who could offer information, craft items, and upgrade skills—assuming they didn’t turn on you first.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Asciident presented itself as a complex fusion of genres. Its core gameplay loop was built around exploration, survival, and RPG progression within its open-world, side-scrolling ASCII environment.

• Exploration & Survival: The player was tasked with exploring the abandoned sectors of Asteroid FA-17, gathering “dozens of resources,” encountering unique creatures and bosses, and managing their clone’s survival. The environment itself was a threat, hinted at by skills like “Radiation resistance” and “Holding breath.”

• Character Progression: The game’s most intriguing system was the “neuroprogrammer,” a device that allowed the clone to be trained in eleven different skills “almost instantly.” This list was extensive and varied:

  • Life force and Inventory space for survivability and utility.
  • Combat proficiencies like Melee weaponry, Thrown weaponry, Plasma weaponry, and Hand-to-hand combat.
  • Piloting skills (Piloting, Hyperspace, Navigation) that teased the future ability to travel between planets.

• Crafting & Interaction: Neutral NPCs were not just lore dispensers; they were vital gameplay conduits for crafting new weapons and performing those critical skill upgrades. This created a potential network of interdependent characters across the asteroid.

• Built-in Games: A charmingly meta addition was the inclusion of computer terminals with built-in mini-games, which could be played to earn in-game currency. This was a nod to the era when computers within fiction were as limited as the computers running the fiction itself.

However, the central caveat, echoed by the developer in forum posts, was that this intricate web of systems existed in a framework that was only “about 10% of the content.” The gameplay available was essentially a promising tech demo—about two hours of exploration in a single location—teasing a much larger, more complex RPG that remained largely unrealized.

World-Building, Art & Sound

This is where Asciident’s most radical and successful element resides. The commitment to its ASCII aesthetic is absolute and surprisingly versatile. This isn’t a game that uses text for menus; its entire reality is constructed from punctuation marks, letters, and numbers. A wall might be a series of # symbols, an enemy a complex arrangement of {, }, and % characters. The genius of the system lies in its configurability: players could choose from eight retro color modes, including authentic 16-color DOS/Mac palettes, monochrome green or amber screens, a 2-bit mode, and even a Game Boy mode. An “LED font” option ensured each character pixel was distinct, enhancing the retro digital feel.

The result is a world that feels both stark and incredibly imaginative. The player’s mind actively participates in parsing the ASCII art into a coherent reality, a process that often leads to a more immersive and personally resonant experience than any pre-rendered graphic could provide. The sound design, courtesy of Andrea Bellucci and Fomin himself, would have been tasked with complementing this minimalist visual, likely employing chiptune or synthetic soundscapes to deepen the retro-futuristic atmosphere.

Reception & Legacy

Asciident’s reception is a story of muted potential. It garnered a “Mixed” rating on Steam based on 25 reviews, with a 64% positive score. Data from Steambase consolidates this to a Player Score of 67/100 from 30 total reviews. No major critic reviews are documented on MobyGames or Metacritic, placing it firmly in the realm of a niche cult curiosity.

The player discussions reveal a small community intrigued by the concept. One user aptly noted it was “an unlinear ASCII game?! INTERESTING. Remind me of old Ultima game from 80s.” Another described it as a “Metroidvania with RPG elements.” The feedback was focused on the game’s unusual ambition and its core, functional mechanics.

Its legacy, however, is ultimately defined by its status as an unfinished project. The developer’s last update was over four years ago, and the ambitious roadmap of new locations and spacecraft travel never materialized. The game remains in Early Access, a digital ghost ship adrift in Steam’s library, its hold filled with promises of planets and adventures that were never loaded. It stands as a poignant reminder of the immense challenges faced by small developers and the fragile nature of ambitious indie projects. Its influence is subtle—a proof-of-concept that demonstrates the enduring power and flexibility of text-based aesthetics, potentially inspiring other developers to explore the limits of minimalist visual design.

Conclusion

Asciident is a fascinating artifact. It is a game of breathtaking conceptual originality, a sincere and well-executed attempt to forge a modern open-world adventure from the raw materials of computing’s past. Its world-building through ASCII is genuinely innovative and artistically commendable. The proposed systems for skills, crafting, and narrative interaction suggested a deep and compelling RPG experience.

Yet, it is impossible to review it as a complete game. It is a brilliant tech demo, a captivating slice of a much larger pie that was never baked. The final verdict on Asciident is therefore split. As a piece of experimental game art, it is a resounding success and a worthy subject of study for historians of indie and retro design. As a commercial video game offering a fulfilling experience, it is an unfulfilled promise, a title forever frozen in its opening chapter. Its place in video game history is secure, but as a cautionary tale of ambition outpacing execution, rather than as the completed revolutionary classic it might have been.