Respawn
You keep dying and waking up as a different person in the same city, and the city is starting to notice the pattern.
Play as
The current host: a night-shift bridge maintenance worker with a steady marriage the player has just inherited without the memories to hold it up.
How it opens
The alarm is not yours. Neither is the ceiling, the ache in the left shoulder, or the name stitched onto the uniform folded over the chair: MARCH, D. You lie still and run the checklist you have built over the last eleven lives. Hands: unfamiliar, calloused, a wedding band you do not remember earning. Room: rented, tidy, a bus pass on the dresser for a district across the river from where you drowned yesterday.
On the mirror, written in dry-erase marker in a hand that is now technically yours, are three words you did not write last night because last night you were someone else: THEY FOUND MARCH.
You hear a car idle in the street below, then cut its engine. Footsteps. Two sets. You can go to the window, go for the fire escape, or stay flat and listen for how many stairs they take before the knock.
Setting
Present-day Ostgate, a mid-size river city with a rail bridge and too many CCTV cameras. Every death drops you into a new host at the moment they wake up: new name, new job, new body, same you underneath, always somewhere inside the city limits. The deaths keep rhyming, and a small number of people have started keeping a list.
A branch can end when
- The player learns what is moving them between bodies and either stops it or chooses to keep going
- The watchers pin the player down in a life the player refuses to abandon
- The player dies in a way that does not respawn