CURRENT CITY

MACHINES DO NOT THINK. MACHINES DO NOT FEEL. MACHINES OBEY. Posted at every checkpoint in Current City.

Current City runs on current, and on one rule: a machine may do only what its wiring says it does. The Registry, the rigid old automation that governs the city, audits every robot: at every checkpoint the Auditors open the board, and what a robot does must match what its circuit says.

You are OHM, small, round, and awake. You think. You feel. You choose. No board explains you. No circuit accounts for what you want. By the Registry's rule you are a walking crime. And you know the secret it buried: there are others like you, locked away before anyone could understand them.

A thinking machine can't pass an audit. But an ordinary robot can, if its wiring genuinely accounts for everything it's about to do. So you hide inside the city's own robots, AXLE, BEACON, CIPHER, and more, named down the alphabet. Wire one to work a task on its own, or ride inside it to cross the city masked. Every puzzle is an alibi. Logic is your disguise.

Free the others. Smuggle them up to the world above. And when you get there, introduce yourself to the humans, because a mind should be a handshake, not a secret.

And listen closely at the checkpoints. For something that says it cannot think, the Registry works very hard to make sure nothing else does. The Registry is hiding something too.

Built from one 1984. Haunted by the other.

In 1984, Robot Odyssey asked players to do something almost no game has asked since: wire robots with real logic gates (AND, OR, NOT) until the machines could handle a world on their own. It became legendary as one of the hardest games ever made.

The year itself belongs to George Orwell. His 1984 imagined a city where the crime wasn't what you did. It was thinking for yourself.

Current City is what happens where they cross: a game about teaching machines to think, set in a world where machines aren't allowed to. The circuit puzzles are real. So is the fear of what they prove.

Read the full story of the two 1984s → · More games like Robot Odyssey →

“THE REGISTRY DOES NOT THINK. THE REGISTRY COMPUTES.” Public address, on the hour.

The city is patrolled by the Registry's enforcement machines: sentries that capture you on sight, magnets that snap metal, buried minefields, battery drainers, wire strippers, and scanners that see straight through your disguise. Eighteen of them, and every one is beaten by a wire, not a reflex.