What happens when the societal deathspiral of hyper consumerism meets the results of backfired bioterrorism? It’s a world of the ultra-elite corporate shareholders meets the desperate overpopulated and polluted streets of an over urbanized world. With the population kept barely alive to avoid riots and revolution through a steady stream of the insipid. When automation does the important work, humans are left fighting for social rank and control of the profits.
Against the machinery of corporate control, one resource – almost eradicated, gives rise to an underground culture. Cheese. The luxury, the diversity, the memory of better times. With most livestock eliminated due to a plague of mysterious origin, Cheese has become an illicit commodity. Unable to synthesize casein, the biolabs and food factories can’t scratch the itch of this cultural legacy. With corporations unable to control its production, its been made an illicit good.
Thanks to small enclaves of surviving livestock, brave underground cheese syndicates operate to provide this forbidden delight. You’ve now got the opportunity to make it as a Cheese Runner, buying and selling the curds to fulfill people’s secret desires. You’ve had to get financing from a loan shark who runs in this crowd, now can you make it in the underground world of cheese running?
Cheese Runner is an ASCII-art cheese trading game set in a dystopian retrofuturistic cyberpunk world where cheese has been outlawed. Gameplay is turn based and focused on commodity trading with limited inventory. Games are short and rapid, with high replayability combining strategy with casual play and features some banging synthwave tracks. Enjoy a dark humour parody of our modern world, and despite the global pandemic meets corporate ownership meets police brutality, this game was actually written BEFORE 2020. Maybe we should have written a game about world peace and kittens instead. Oh well, there’s always next time!