The Carcass

Update 10th August: Seems I may have been naive about this one! While there's no AI disclosure on the full Steam page for The Carcass, there is a disclosure on the separate store page for the demo. Here's the disclosure in full. "The entire vision, design, and core structure of this game are the result of human effort. AI tools were used strictly as a coding assistant during development—to speed up programming, debug, and optimize performance. This project is the result of a year of hard work; it was not 'generated' with a few simple prompts." Disclosure aside, there are a bunch of Steam reviews of the demo accusing the developer of using generative AI to create the game's writing and art. I've mailed PiqFocus for further details. Read more

Update 2.1.5 — Fourteen Complaints, Fourteen Answers Two days before launch, the last big update. We went back through every criticism the game has received, put all fourteen on one page, and gave each one either a fix or a number. Your choice stays on the screen The most common complaint was also the worst one: you would make a decision and never see what it did. A queued command was firing in the same breath as your choice, so a pulse worth of notifications landed on top of the receipt and the view scrolled past it. Now the receipt stays put. A continuation line names what is waiting, and it plays only when you press Enter. The tutorial tells you it is waiting A guided lesson would sit on the same step forever if you never gave the command it wanted — in one run the same objective hung from step 23 all the way to step 1106. That is exactly the "I pressed end turn ten times and nothing happened" report. Now, every three unanswered pulses, an amber line tells you how long it has been waiting and points at the way out. A guided lesson never advances itself, and it never skips in silence. The first hour has its own face Two things happened to the art. A fitting bug was eati

Update 2.1.4 — Five Ways Out, and the Game Shows You Where You Are A small update, 3 days before launch — three things you will notice at the terminal. The game tells you where you stand There are five ways out of the carcass — Dominion, Symbiosis, Awakening, Escape, Transcendence — and each one is now four named stages long. At any moment you can see how far along a path you are as a percentage, and the game names the exact step you are still missing: one more region under your control, or one piece of knowledge you have not researched yet. No more guessing which ending you are drifting toward. The same start, three different games Begin from the same seed and follow three different doctrines, and you will not play the same run twice. Only 37% of the events overlap; each doctrine turns up thirteen the other two never show you. After thirty pulses the biomass alone reads 974, 1,550 or 602. What you get out of the carcass depends on how you decide to live inside it, not on what you rolled. Exit words work everywhere now Typing back or cancel at a "how many?" prompt used to answer "Invalid" and ask the question again. It now means what it means everywhere else in

Update 2.1.3 — Every Species Now Carries Its Own Campaign The largest content update the demo has ever received, 4 days before launch. 31 species · 166 scenes · 51 permanent outcomes Every canonical species in the carcass now has a multi-stage story arc — around five scenes, usually three different endings. Those endings are not flavour text. Each one leaves behind a mechanical consequence that keeps working for the rest of your run: a production multiplier, a tithe per pulse, a research discount, a morale stream, plague resistance, nightmare damage, or the attention of the thing you are living inside. Consequences are neither reversed nor forgotten Break one sealed door and the galleries spoil themselves that same night — the crust stays more expensive forever. Withhold a guild's apprentice and your colony is recorded as half-taught. Clear the enzyme rows for one tidy field and the soil remembers, permanently. Some peoples never knock One of them does not protest, does not warn, does not resist — its entire arc is what you choose to notice. Two others you never meet at all; keeping your distance is the whole relationship. The number you are shown is the number you pay Live pl