Operate on the universe.

ALL ADRIFT is a Cosmic Surgery RPG where you make fire wet and water burn.

Slip inside the Declarations that define the shape of this universe, then cut, overwrite, and stitch together what they say.

And you rewrote the Word, saying, Let the fire be wet: and the fire was wet.

Let the water burn: and the water burned.

And you saw that it was good.

"Let there be light" was only someone's Declaration.

Before your scalpel, nothing is sacred.

A person's inner self, a species' nature, a forest's food chain, the creed a civilization lives by, even the properties a planet is born with.

All of them are mere sentences, laid out on your operating table.

Put a knife to a planet's past. The world of today will be overturned.

Don't like reality? Operate without hesitation.

You are Sian Lightchaser, a civil servant in the Arwin Empire's espionage division

And you, too, are a Declaration in human form.

For the empire that annihilated your own people, you have carved away countless lives and histories. They call you the Cosmic Surgeon, a title and a slur in one.

To survive. And to reach the truth hidden in what you really are.

Infiltrate under false identities, rifle through classified documents, and eavesdrop on conversations to uncover what really happened. But you don't have to report everything you find.

Create a religion the universe will worship

Then a new order comes down:

"Compose a scripture to found a religion for the Empire."

Four hundred years since the peace talks, and the Great War is still "winding down."

To unite the universe, apparently, this time it takes a new faith.

Search history and myth for the moments that please you.

Cut out the Declarations that make up those moments and dress them up, then toss them into the scripture.

Each moment you have chosen becomes a verse, and that verse will become a rule that governs the universe.

Well, don't overthink it. For you, it's just routine paperwork.

To someone out there, though, it'll be gospel.

Declarations will remain, the world will follow.

As it always has.

Confront the history and the human face laid upon the operating table.

Drift over the records of sin humankind has left behind, and render your answer on the meaning of existence and on salvation.

Be it black or white, walk the end of humankind and lay bare your most ‘human’ face.

Sian sits in the carriage, gazing out the window. A beautiful flash of gold, as if to swallow the whole sky, forces its way through the gaps in the white clouds, spreads like a fracture, flares, and is gone. Most likely it was light spilled by the Empire’s Final Word weapon as it swept away yet another pitiful galaxy. She imagines the histories that light must have just erased from the universe. Is it a scar of human sin, or a crease in a world sinking into dusk? Neither would be wrong. Yet in an age when brooding like a human has become an eccentric pastime, she plays the eccentric, if only for a moment.

Sian still sits in the carriage, gazing out the window. One of the guides busily peddling death charges at the carriage with the zeal of a hard-bitten market hawker, reminding her that the planet she has just reached is trialing death as entertainment.

The Most Rapturous Deaths: Best Selection

On the cover of the book the guide thrusts at her, clinging to the carriage, that ironic title is brazenly embroidered beside an illustration of several people lying in smiling repose. The headless coachman waves him off with a menacing gesture, and the guide’s eyes, finding no head to glare at, wander for a moment over every corner of the coachman’s body until they find the emblem of Arwin—then drop hastily to the ground, fleeing a gaze that cannot exist.

Even amid all this commotion, Sian sits in the carriage, gazing out the window. Indifferently, she shifts her focus to the electronic board above the road.

Today’s War Dead: 91,060,000,080

Four hundred years of ceasefire for the peace talks alone. Contrary to four centuries of propaganda that ‘the war is ending,’ countless numbers vanish again today, leaving nothing behind, as numbers brandished by those who answer for nothing. Just a numbers game. An endless numbers game. A goddamn colossal numbers game. As Sian stares at the board and tries to tally the numbers that must have vanished during the ceasefire, the propaganda hour seems to have come: a fervent voice rings out from the speaker inside the carriage.

“History is being written in Arwin’s hand!”

A lie.

“Our lofty honor is born of devotion to the Empire…”

A lofty lie.

“The great Arwinian does not fear death! Death fears the Arwinian!”

A great, garbage lie.

“Stake your future on the Empire!”

That one must be sincere.

In this world that can reach every star in the sky, yet has narrowed, by the very length of its freedom, into a suffocating cage, Sian listens to the propaganda echoing through the carriage and thinks.

Is even this not enough? Having erased all those peoples, all those planets, having made all those lives less than mere numbers—is there still something left to carve away, even if it means violating this very taboo: operating on the universe?

Sian gazes at the cursed finger that holds her—the finger that has made every life beyond the window less than a mere number—and is crushed beneath ‘the weight of karma,’ which numbs every feeling and every thought. Upon her, and upon that hand, lies the neck of tomorrow. And once again, the swing falls to her.

There is no god in a world this wretched. Surely there is none. And even if there were, it would hardly be a being from which we could expect anything as paltry as hope. But that is the story so far. What of tomorrow? Coiled at the heart of the capital of Arwin, a tower so white it is black covets the seat of honor in a godless world, and moves, insidiously, toward tomorrow.

Above all these stories, Sian sits confined in the carriage.

For a while yet, she will remain so.

Producer, Director, Writer, Game Design Director, Art Director, Music Producer

Bae Sang Hyun

The video game is dead.

Restart with ALL ADRIFT.