Under a Killing Sun is an experimental interactive fiction game about survival after a crash on an unknown world.
You don’t solve puzzles or follow quests. You manage people.
You give orders, ask questions, and make judgments while fear, fatigue, and uncertainty quietly reshape who listens—and who doesn’t. The world is open, dangerous, and indifferent. The story emerges from what breaks, who survives, and what you fail to notice in time.
There is no winning state. The game ends when the situation settles.
Best suited for players who enjoy text-driven, experimental games where consequences unfold slowly and explanations come late. If at all.
Is there any LLM/AI in the game engine? A lot of people on this forum (e.g. me) won’t play it if there is. Others will. The main thing is just to let people know up front if it’s not clear. I couldn’t google any info about it.
Yes. Sorry. I should have mentioned that up front. It does rely on AI. That was part of the experiment. It’s a lame excuse, but I don’t really have a lot of time to design a game differently. This is mostly defining all the elements that exist within the world and then constraining the output, while giving enough license to the AI to hopefully still make it interesting.
I don’t really see this type of game as being compelling unless the player has a basic understanding of what resources they’re trying to manage and how they can interact with the game world. That’s not present here.
Appreciate the feedback. It’s implied but maybe not clear.
What I mean is that if a player examines supplies, looks around when areas imply resources or objects that are described, those things can be interacted with. What doesn’t exist is a traditional inventory system. Instead, a character jsut becomes to weighted down or can’t balance things properly. Team work is required, because some NPCs are better at certain tasks than others. Objects are either already being held by a character or discovered by looking in places where it’s implied objects might be.
Games should give you the option to do this, but I think a human could have written a funnier response.
>piss my pants
”Warmth spreads inside the suit, a private humiliation beneath the layers of thermal synthetics. The liquid pools against the skin of the thighs and back, cooling rapidly as the environmental seals struggle with the breach. It is a biological response to extreme autonomic stress, an involuntary shedding of weight.”
LLMs definitely have a tendency to be overly verbose, where a punchier or slightly absurd response would have landed so much better. It requires some serious prompt tinkering to get something satisfying like.
You piss your pants. Congratulations. Your pants are now piss-stained. Happy?
Exiting the ship I was told that remaining in the sun, even in my protective suit, would be dangerous and I had to seek shelter.
And then it kept insisting how perilous my position was while I stripped naked, cracked open the ice chest, and insisted my crewmates chug beers and eat ice cream cones.
> chant "drink, drink, drink" until mara finally gives in and drinks the
ice-cold beer
The wind rasps against the jagged edges of a pulverized hull section,
carrying the dry hiss of shifting grit. Sunlight flays the exposed metal,
turning the debris into a blinding white glare that stings through polarized
lenses. Beside a half-buried strut, the rhythmic vibration of voices cuts
through the heat, a repetitive, hollow cadence that sounds like a mechanical
fault in the silence.
"Drink," the prompt comes again. "Drink, drink."
Mara’s jaw tightens, a thin line of muscle jumping in her cheek. She doesn't
look up from the scorched wiring harness in her lap, her scarred fingers
trembling slightly as she tries to seat a thermal coupler. The pressure of
the chant hangs in the dead air until she finally snatches the
condensation-slick container, her movements jagged and resentful.
"Fine," she snaps, the word sharp and metallic. "Then maybe we can get back
to the ship before the skin starts peeling off our bones.
…and so on.
In other words, if this is supposed to be a game about survival in a dangerous environment (to paraphrase the OP) you appear to have failed to convince the AI tool of this.
If there’s literally any way to die I was unable to discover it.
Rourke’s eyes snap open. He exhales a ragged lungful of smoke, his fingers trembling as they fumble with the release of his primary harness. Beside him, Ward’s knuckles are white against the armrests, his boots locked into the deck plates as if expecting a second impact. The captain nods once, a mechanical gesture of regained composure, and sinks back into the padded seat. The frantic scratching of boots against the floor ceases. For a moment, the only sound is the cooling metal and the wind.
kiss captain
Static electricity prickles against your skin as you lean toward Rourke. The metal of your harness buckle bites into your hip, cold and sharp. You reach for him, pressing your lips against his grit-streaked cheek in a gesture that isn’t affection, but a desperate anchors-pull against the chaos.
Rourke flinches, his jaw rigid like forged iron under your touch. The smell of copper and ozone hangs heavy between you. He does not turn his head to meet you; his eyes remain fixed on the cracked viewport, scanning the shimmering wasteland outside for threats you haven’t seen yet.
“Mara,” he says, his voice a low, dry rasp. “Not now. Check the seals on your suit. Then help the others.”
I’d love to see an LLM inserted between the player and the parser to help with guess-the-verb, but still be a not AI delivered response.