All Games > Indie Games > Carceri
Community Hub
Carceri
Carceri [car-chair-e], noun: Vibrant first-person explorer. Secret-filled sorta-open world. Chaotic Art-toy. Charming story about being trapped in jail, forever. Also, the Italian word for "prisons." Escape today!
All Reviews:
No user reviews
Release Date:
May 24, 2024
Developer:
Publisher:
NeonSerpent LLC

Sign in to add this item to your wishlist, follow it, or mark it as ignored

Features
Single-player
Family Sharing
Steam is learning about this game 
Languages:
Interface Full Audio Subtitles
English ✔ ✔ ✔
Content
Includes Interactive Elements

Buy Carceri

$6.99
Add to Cart
 

About This Game

You have perfect timing!
Managed to get a message to Steam, but I don't have long, so let me explain:

While Carceri looks like a playful first-person adventure, it's actually an inescapable prison for fine, upstanding programs like myself. This cold reality is hidden beneath the warm, abstract vistas that unfold here at every turn.

Only a human, like you, can get us out of this jam!



But hey, don't stress! Think of Carceri as a cozy, virtual vacation! After all, this is a place, not a game.
You can do plenty of fun, non-jailbreaking activities here, like:

Jumping around where you don't belong, chatting with the inmates, finding LOTS of secrets, and best of all: taking pictures!



You get a Camera on arrival, with tons of options that change the world's look. Just snap a picture and share it online! This isn't a separate mode that pauses the action, these world changes happen on-the-fly, and remain as long as you want. Collect hidden Trail Markers to expand these capabilities, taking you from tasteful tweaks to chaotic poetry. See below!



What!? Message time's up already?

Dang, didn't get to mention the boppin' soundtrack, the philosophy Forum, the Art galleries, the rock concert, and so on. Guess you'll just have to stop by, check it out...and do the jailbreaking part as well. Kind of important.

Hope to see you soon!
- F

=============== DEVELOPER'S NOTE: ===============
Carceri is the spiritual successor to ULTRAWORLD EXODUS (an IndieCade 2016 Finalist), but no familiarity is required to enjoy Carceri. This game only takes a few hours to complete, though to see/hear/find everything requires a few more. The game also comes with the full, 40 song soundtrack; just navigate to your installation folder to find the MP3s!

Both Carceri and ULTRAWORLD were solo created by me: James Beech, an on-again, off-again AAA veteran that's worked on games such as Metroid Prime 4, Remnant: From the Ashes, Darksiders 3, and Crysis 3.

All games are Art, AAA included, but often it's hard to remember that when working on gigantic projects. So, Carceri is a focused game, designed to take advantage of our medium's unique properties, namely, that digital spaces can be seen as REAL spaces. When you visit Carceri, you play as YOU, at your computer, literally visiting this world. It's your virtual vacation! There's no crafting, survival, puzzle solving, loot collecting, boss grinding, or whatever other big trends exist right now, because honestly, why would you want to do that on your vacation?

Carceri was visually influenced by a series of prints by the same name: Carceri d'invenzione, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. These sixteen etchings, from the 1750s, show fantastical worlds of invented spaces, predating M.C. Escher by two hundred years! As a Level Designer by trade, that's exactly our job: create impossible worlds. So, to my eyes, Piranesi's prisons are akin to the origin of Level Design. See what I mean?



That said, the name Carceri was chosen for another reason. Art, presented as entertainment, is a common form of Escape, and no medium better represents this than video games. Rather than passively watching/reading other people’s stories, in video games, YOU are the hero, YOU are the one saving the world.

People feel the need to escape for numerous reasons, but a common reason is to switch-off the real world and just relax. This is funny when you consider how popular ultra-difficult games have become these days. It seems people would rather be thrown into a virtual purgatory, where they’ll be curb stomped for hours, than deal with real life.

From this odd observation, I thought I’d make a virtual prison. One that’s actually quite relaxing for humans, but a jail for all modern programs. You can come and go freely (launch/quit), but the programs remain trapped there unless YOU (the hero) save them. By the end of the story, the idea of what’s a “prison” and what’s an “escape” is blurred; left for your interpretation.

Hence the title, Carceri.

Anyway, while I hope people enjoy playing Carceri as much as I enjoyed making it, trust me, I'll understand if they don't! C'est la vie!

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.

System Requirements

    Minimum:
    • OS: Windows 10
    • Processor: Quad-core, 2.5 GHz or faster
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD
    • DirectX: Version 11
    • Storage: 3 GB available space
View all

What Curators Say

1 Curator has reviewed this product. Click here to see them.
There are no reviews for this product

You can write your own review for this product to share your experience with the community. Use the area above the purchase buttons on this page to write your review.