Sarcophagus

— from the Greek sarx meaning “flesh”, and phagein meaning “to eat”.

Sarcophagus is a one-man game project in the sandbox/survival genre. It’s heavily inspired by the works of Sisyphus and the idea of the ennobling power of labor.

You start your lifespan in a shallow environment of (an allegory of) the cave and slowly work your way to a blooming garden by building and maintaining the cave’s ecosystem.

The game is deceptively empty at first, but make to mistake - you can populate it all by yourself.

By no means it’s a god sim, food always will be a problem (you must grow what you eat) and you’ll have to face some other human-specific limitations like an overwhelming urge to multitask, a pain of managing priorities, limited inventory space, absence of game’s wiki and author’s inability to communicate in good English.

The game is more on hardcore’ish/demanding/oldskool side of a spectrum and requires some exploration, learning and adjusting to its quirks.

It’s not a clone of anything, the purpose of creating the game was not an imitation of things I like but rather playing in a sandbox and looking at the ways things unfold. Sandbox game created as a sandbox project. So meta.

How to play:

Get Ice Shards.

Knowledge is power. Inspect everything you can.

Some items/blocks can be brought to The Machine for useful info and transformations - pay attention to ≈ sign.

The Machine is your friend.

» Telegram channel with news and releases.

» Discord server with news and releases.

% love --version
LOVE 11.1 (Mysterious Mysteries)
% love sarcophagus.love 
Error: main.lua:26: Invalid window setting: usedpiscale
stack traceback:
	[string "boot.lua"]:637: in function <[string "boot.lua"]:633>
	[C]: in function 'setMode'
	main.lua:26: in main chunk
	[C]: in function 'require'
	[string "boot.lua"]:475: in function <[string "boot.lua"]:311>
	[C]: in function 'xpcall'
	[string "boot.lua"]:645: in function <[string "boot.lua"]:639>
	[C]: in function 'xpcall'