Coming soon

About This Game

Node City, 2061. Nobody says welcome here. You get a system name instead. Every door, locker and turnstile in town answers to one operating system, CivOS. You step off the train at a tiny halt among the birches with nothing but a can of soda. The last tenant of your room skipped out two weeks behind on rent and left all his stuff. If you want to know why, you’ll need a terminal.

ROOT: Node City is a free browser RPG that teaches you the real Linux terminal as you play. Every command you type is the real thing and works the same on any Linux or macOS machine.

Quests: every step is a puzzle

Your laptop has a working terminal with its own file system. Nobody tells you the story. You piece it together from what people left behind: a hostel guest book, a pawnbroker’s ledgers, a stranger’s flash drive, a log nobody was supposed to read. Each step is a small puzzle you solve with the right commands. The game checks the result, not what you typed, so any approach that works counts.

Quests come in modules, from your first steps in a terminal to text processing, pipes and editing files with sed. Each module ends with a certification. Updates bring new modules, and each one takes you deeper into how real systems work. Hints cost in-game money. They tell you where to look, a method or a man page, but never give you the answer.

A town that runs on one OS

Explore a science town tucked into a pine forest. Rent a bunk at Dot’s hostel, sell your junk to Vic at the pawnshop, and track down the old radio club in the University basement, where Kit watches other people fix things. Everyone here has a name, plus the system name CivOS gave them.

• Search the town for junk, parts and collectibles. Strip your finds for parts, or complete sets to sell them for more.

• Build a pocket radio at the workbench, get it through its self-test in the terminal and tune in the city’s stations. Not every frequency is on the list.

• Find lost flash drives with someone’s whole life on them. Nobody will tell you that story. You’ll have to dig it up yourself.

Drills

Short timed runs for every command you’ve learned, on a fresh machine every time. Chase personal bests and the lowest command count, and earn medals across six tiers for each drill. Practice is always free.

Go Dark

The same map has a flip side. Go Dark and the town changes: CivOS stops seeing you and starts hunting you.

• Letters arrive asking for small favors on old servers: find a file, change a line in a list, catch what a scheduled script is writing. Nobody tells you how.

• Every job takes nerve. Your cover wears thinner with every second and every command, and when it’s gone, you’re traced and thrown back into the light.

• Clean up after yourself. Whatever you leave in the logs will cost you.

• Reputation unlocks harder letters, six levels deep in the first layer of the Dark. Your level won’t help you here. Only what you actually know will.

Honest work pays the rent. This pays better.

Progression

Your level reflects what you’ve actually learned, since XP comes only from quests and drills. Every level comes with a title that shows how the town sees you. Collect certifications, drill medals and achievements. Many achievements are hidden and reward curiosity and mistakes. In the Dark, the only thing that counts is reputation.

Details

• Single-player, online: the terminal and your town run on our servers, so your progress is saved and you need an internet connection.

• Interface in English and Russian. The terminal itself stays in English, just like on any real server.

• Free to play.

The skills are real. The town isn’t. Mostly.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Visual art was created with an image generation model and curated by the developer. Some text drafts and Russian localization drafts were written with AI assistance and edited by the developer. In the dark mode, short in-world job letters and their optional Russian translations are generated by a language model on our servers; players cannot prompt the model, and every letter passes automated checks and developer review before it reaches the game.

Connects to 3rd-Party Service for AI Content Generation: Claude by Anthropic