Road to Mechalopolis

No common language. No common sense. One common road. The machines won. Nobody remembers exactly when it happened, but the world belongs to them now. Machines patrol every corner of the wasteland, their red lights glowing in the dark. They were built to serve. Now they hunt. At the center of it all stands Mechalopolis 01 — the city of machines, home to A-RAM, the artificial intelligence that controls everything. Nobody goes there willingly. Nobody sane, anyway. THE STORY Dot is eleven years old and impossibly stubborn. For reasons she hasn't explained — not that anyone would understand her if she tried — she has decided to walk straight toward Mechalopolis 01. Along the way she'll meet I-ZAK and J-COB, two defective robots with blue lights instead of red, who have no interest in hunting humans. They'll warn her. They'll argue with her. They'll reason with her. It won't matter. Dot speaks a different language. Literally. THREE CHARACTERS. ONE TEAM. ZERO MARGIN FOR ERROR. Road to Mechalopolis is built around a simple idea borrowed from the classics: no single character can do everything. Dot, I-ZAK and J-COB each carry abilities the others don't have, and the only way forward is to use all three. DOT — The only human on the team. Her goggles reveal hidden secrets invisible to everyone else. Her scream draws nearby enemies away from where it matters. And she's the only one who can swim. If Dot falls, it's game over. I-ZAK — Can't speak, communicates through emoticons on his screen. His extendable arms reach places nobody else can, and his antenna lets him hijack nearby enemy robots temporarily. J-COB — Built like a tank. Because he essentially is one. Deploys a shield that protects the whole team, angles it upward as a platform, and uses a dash that shatters walls and stuns enemies. EXPLORE. SOLVE. SURVIVE. Six distinct zones stand between Dot and Mechalopolis 01. Levels are large, labyrinthine and full of secrets — multiple routes, hidden areas and things that reward the curious. Along the way, collect circuits and salvaged currency to spend in a small town populated entirely by blue-lit defective robots, the safest place on earth, where you can upgrade abilities and improve your stats. And if I-ZAK or J-COB are destroyed along the way, they leave behind a black box. Carry it to the exit and they'll be rebuilt for the next level. A team that arrives in pieces is still a team that arrives. THE SOUNDTRACK Every piece of music in Road to Mechalopolis is drawn from the classical canon — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven — reimagined in chiptune. It shouldn't work as well as it does. It really does.