Total Alarm

Total Alarm (n): an anxious awareness of absolute danger

Repairing crumbling space stations. Procuring essential products on the black market. Avoiding spies and secret police. Such is life under the watchful eye of the authoritarian Collective. But there’s more to existence in this galactic totalitarian society than simply learning to live in a shortage economy. As routine missions slowly morph into something more insidious, a terrifying secret will come to life – a secret the Collective would do anything to keep hidden.

Total Alarm combines narrative adventure and resource management with a star-spanning science fiction setting and a retro-future style. A once celebrated top-class engineer, you’ve been sentenced to menial work on the fringes of settled space. Your crime? Wrongthink, just one of the many violations that can prompt the Collective’s harsh reprisals. In fact, you’ll want to avoid the least slip in your efforts to keep the lights on and air flowing through the deep-space derelicts you’ve been tasked with maintaining. Only vigilance will keep you from the ultimate punishment: a short walk out of an open airlock.

Not that your task would be easy on its own. A centrally controlled economy plagued by chronic shortages, a rust bucket of a spaceship with minimal fuel reserves, a malign A.I. designed to thwart any attempt at desertion – these hindrances only make the basic maintenance of space stations that much harder. It’ll take good contacts, access to a booming black market, and every ounce of cleverness you can scrape together simply to survive.

But survival isn’t your ultimate goal. Rather than wait on a reprieve that will likely never come, you plan to escape. Citizens, though, can’t just freely relocate. Each system is tightly guarded. And surveillance sweeps keep everyone under the Collective’s totalitarian thumb. The only option is to bide your time and wait for an opportunity, performing assigned tasks to the best of your ability. And so you’ll…

• Travel between various start systems to repair various failing space stations
  
• Secretly snatch new scraps of freedom during routine missions
  
• Manage resources such as fuel, navigation data, spare parts, and consumer goods
  
• Repair, protect, trade, and smuggle legal and illegal goods – and people
  
• Interact with the others, build your own network, gain the trust of the populace, and avoid informants
  
• Develop your character in order to better manage advanced social interactions
  
• Upgrade your spaceship, the fundamental tool for your work and your basis for survival
  
• Collect special items and powerups
  
• Discover the Collective’s biggest secret and face a crucial challenge that could undermine an entire community