Buy Carceri

About This Game

Welcome to the most hidden corner of Steam! Let me tell you about my game...

When you visit Carceri Zero, you don't play a Character, you are YOU, the person at your desk, reading these words.

Think of it like a virtual vacation, a living world that's both a gallery for Art, and Art itself. You bop through the colorful scenery, camera in hand, uncovering secrets, and a cute little story!

While not wildly groundbreaking, Carceri Zero is quietly unlike anything you've played before. The game is hard to explain (and sell) because there's nothing quite like it, at least not directly. Carceri is three things combined: a video game, a work of Art, and a Real place.

As a video game...

Carceri Zero is a relaxing, first-person narrative/exploration focused experience. You navigate several gorgeous, interconnected zones while platforming, talking to NPCs, finding lots of secrets, and taking pictures with a heavily upgradable camera. You also follow a story, one about the Programs that run our world. They've been given this beautiful place to live, yet aren't allowed to leave. Is this their paradise, or their prison? They need your outsider, human help!

As a work of Art...

Carceri Zero is a contemporary landscape painting, an acknowledgement that video games and landscapes are both forms of Escape. Many in my family are landscape painters, and this is my way of continuing that tradition. However, rather than dictate to you what this 3D landscape looks like, your camera changes the look of the world, so you're the Art director! (The abstract screenshots above were taken in-game, using the camera's options).

As a Real place...

The world of Carceri Zero is conceived to actually Exist, a proper extension of our Reality. Carceri's residents, Programs, consider their 3D world more legit than the physical world you inhabit now (which they think of a merely a Simulation). The game's design, and story, revolve around this concept. It's not breaking the 4th wall, because the 4th wall doesn't exist here! If you go in with that suspension of disbelief, that this isn't fiction, it changes the vibe of everything.

Any uniqueness or charm Carceri Zero has (if any) comes from this bizarre combination of elements. Is this a harmonious marriage, or is it a chimera? You tell me!

This is a 2-4 hour game, a spiritual successor to ULTRAWORLD EXODUS, though no familiarity is required. Carceri Zero's not challenging, so anyone can complete the narrative portion of the experience, and there's things to do afterwards (like an in-game podcast discussing the Simulation Hypothesis). Also, buying the game gives access to the 41 song original soundtrack (only a bonus if you dig the music).

About the Creator

Solo-dev James Beech is a bizarre combination of AAA game vet and Fine Artist. He's worked as a Level Designer on Metroid Prime 4, Remnant From the Ashes, Darksiders 3, and Crysis 3. He's also released several albums, and hundreds of so-called "paintings." Unsurprisingly, he sees video games as an Art form, and is doing what little he can to add to the medium, though ultimately he may be subtracting instead!

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Carceri's story portrays a world made by programs, for programs. While ALL the writing, music, and 3D art in this game was created by a single human being, there is an Art Gallery in-game that contains 50 images, 17 of which have been generated by AI, (that are all clearly marked as such). These are fictionally portrayed as art works created by the characters (programs) of this world.

No names of modern, living artists were used to generate these images. The prompts were words such as: Hudson River school, old masters, Delacroix, robots, abstract geometry, landscape. From there, I photo-shopped all images so that none are 100% unaltered from the generation process.

Acknowledging generative imagery's existence is important to the world-building and meta-narrative of Carceri, so this was the fairest way I could think to include a small dose of these works, which are divisive by their very nature.