What’s up all!
In the last blog post, we presented the game’s Art Direction. This time, we wanted to give more context on the world the game takes place in.
Sydless, is set in Randy’s Burgers, a very ordinary 90s Californian suburban fast-food chain: checkered floors, plastic seats, lots of silly branded stuff – the kind of place that feels familiar and repetitive if you’re familiar with the dragon-shirts-and-low-jeans aesthetic. We briefly explained in a previous Steam post why we chose this as the main setting – if you’re interested in our thought process, you should check that out!
Once we had laid that out, the core idea was simple: what happens when that familiar space breaks?
You play as Diego; an employee stuck on a shift that is already going poorly as customers are being customers and his boss is being a boss. At some point, Diego tries to catch a break in the staff room, prompting an unexpected event that spirals out of control and puts the restaurant at the center of an anomaly. In this universe, several anomalies exist, functioning as “bugs” amplifying an aspect of someone’s personality. From there, the restaurant starts to change, not into something completely alien – at least not at first *wink, wink* – but into something off.
Rooms stretch and repeat, the layout almost makes sense, but not quite. We didn’t want long cutscenes or heavy explanations, the story mostly lives in the background and act as a context for the gameplay, an explanation for the pressure, if that makes sense. There is some amount of symbolism, but we’ll let you figure that out by yourself as you progress through the game! A hint: Sydless isn’t about saving the restaurant or understanding the anomaly, it’s more about navigating a situation where there’s no obvious way out except forward.
That’s all for now! We still have a demo available for you to try out, and if you want to follow along as we keep building the game, we’re active on our socials – come and interact with us:
See you next week!