A homecoming by sea Early build

Nostos

A Bronze Age sea, in pixels. Wash up a stranger, learn the coasts' tongues a word at a time, barter, fight and make your way. On a phone or a keyboard.

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What it is

Nostos takes its name from the Odyssey's own word for the homecoming. It is a small top-down pixel game set on a closed Bronze Age sea, and the period was chosen because its real institutions already are the mechanics: guest-friendship, gift exchange, and a sailing season that closes whether you are ready or not.

It opens on a wreck. You wake on a beach you have never seen, with no boat and not one word of the language, and you find out who you were in the reflection of a tide pool. There is no clock on anything. It is an early build, made a phase at a time and played between each one, and it plays on a phone as well as a keyboard.

At a glance

top-down pixel art, drawn in codeView
a closed Bronze Age seaSetting
8 open, 26 sitedCoasts
18, learned a word at a timeTongues
6, on Old School RuneScape's curveSkills
touch or keyboardControls

What is in it

The shape of it.

You wash up a stranger

A wreck at night, then a beach below a town that does not know you. You make yourself at a tide pool: name, face, build, clothes.

The language is the map

Everything anyone says is made of words you may not know yet. People teach you the spoken ones, carved stones the written ones, and a neighbour's dialect is half-readable from the first day.

Guest-friendship is the law

Walk onto a town's ground and its host comes down to meet you: the cup, the choice, the night, the gift.

Barter, and no change

No money. Lay your goods on a host's mat. What a thing is worth depends on how far it has come, and nobody buys back their own work.

Skills, the long way

Melee, woodcutting, fishing, cooking, mining and smithing. Tin is in the west and iron in the east, so a better tool is a voyage.

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