A.C.R.E. 2

Issue 002 left A.C.R.E. in year 23 after the Flash, broadcasting to the Coast from a radio mast. A.C.R.E. 2 is its sequel, and it picks up eight years later with the same terminal waking up in the same kind of place: a dead school bus, five survivors and a wasteland that has grown much larger in the meantime.

What changed

The first A.C.R.E. drew everything in code. The sequel arrives with hand-drawn sprites, settler portraits, illustrated expedition cards and epilogue slides, and the difference shows from the first screen. Its own history counts three generations: the GEKK prototype, A.C.R.E., and this one.

A bigger world. Every start rolls a new map across six biomes, with highways, ruins, oil seeps and junk to pick over.
Salvage. Fridges, tires, vending machines, cars, a crashed plane and a satellite dish. Large wrecks come apart in visible stages.
Oil. Pumpjacks stand on the seeps, run dry and poison the soil around them.
The dark. Every seventh day is night. Settlers go indoors, work slows and the raiders come.
Expeditions. A buggy with three settlers goes out into the wasteland and comes back with a story and a choice.

Directive 7

Somewhere in the terminal sits an order called Directive 7, and sooner or later the colony has to decide what to do about it. Erase it, and A.C.R.E. runs in civilian mode and builds a radio mast to call the Coast: the Light. Restore it, and the machine builds a Black Spire instead, and the call becomes a trap: the Shadow. There is a third way, the Silence, which the game does not advertise. In that ending A.C.R.E. is switched off for good, and the colony goes on without it.

The operator manual is written in Simplified Technical English, and some of its sections stay redacted until the colony makes the right choices. Read it after each decision. It changes.

FIELD TEST. Hold out to the first night, on day seven, then use Download save. The colony leaves the browser as a .json file and loads back on another machine, day count and all.