You are the scion of the Elbéar tribe and your father, the chieftain, is dying.
Welcome to this series of blog posts about the world of C.L.A.Y. – The Last Redemption! In it, we will talk about various aspects of the world and what you can expect to find during your time with the game. The intention isn’t to spoil the story (and in fact there won’t be much talk about the story!): rather they will be appetizers, a way to whet your appetite in the long wait for the finished game.
In order to maintain some of the mystery of the world, not everything in these blog posts will necessarily be entirely true. They do represent what you, the player character, would know about the world – although written in a way to be more accessible to the casual reader. Still, go into it with a dose of scepticism, and expect to be surprised.
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The City
In the game, your tribe is a native inhabitant of what the outside world calls the Moving City. The City is alive in the most literal sense: it is built out of the titular Clay, programmable smart-matter that is capable of forming into anything, and inside that Clay lives an ancient, inhuman intelligence. For reasons unknown, the City is constantly expanding, erecting new districts and building new roads according to some unseen master plan. Clay, however, cannot replicate: whenever the City runs out of material, it begins to cannibalize the oldest parts of itself. And so, the City moves, material surging from one end to the other in a seemingly endless cycle.
To the outside world, the City is like an unnatural disaster. Its edges swarm with autonomous drones and crawler bots, clearing the way for the buildings themselves (or helping with the process of disassembling old districts), and they are not kind to any ‘trespassers’ they come across. Whole communities find themselves forced to evacuate or risk getting swallowed by the City as it approaches. Many have tried to fight back, but to little effect: how do you fight buildings, roads and parking lots that appear overnight, slowly snaking their way across the countryside? To the people outside the City, waking up one day to find a skyscraper on the horizon is a very real fear – especially as it is joined the next day by another, and another, until your fields are paved over, your game scared away, and what remains of your forests are filled with drones cutting down trees, burning away grass, and killing anyone who dares to try to stand up to them.
That, at least, was the way of the Moving City before you were born. About twenty years before the start of the game, the City for no apparent reason came to a halt. Its perimeters are still closely guarded, the drones not letting anyone in(or out), but the City itself has become dormant. In the decades since, nature has moved in, growing over the half-finished districts where it could, streets becoming meadows and empty stacks sinking into the ground. But the City still lives, and dreams: buildings disappear or appear overnight, the internal geography of the City remains in constant flux, and in the Center, construction of the great Crescent is never-ending.
And now, the shamans augur a change. A return, perhaps, to the old ways – or something else? Whatever it is, you will have to prepare if you are to become the next chieftain of your tribe.