Obligate's demo is out
The demo of Obligate is out. It is free, it is for Windows, and it is on itch.io: wickhouse.itch.io/obligate.
Obligate is a twin-stick roguelite about a virus with no body of its own. You touch a cell and it is yours: its shape, its weapon, its ability. You ride it until it fails, burst out in a swarm, and take the next one before your time runs out. There are no character picks. The cell you are wearing is your class, and every enemy is a body you could be wearing next.
What is in the demo
One full organ, from the title screen to the lymph node. A run takes about ten minutes.
- Three ways into the body: a skin wound, the airway and the gut lining, each a road to its own lymph node.
- An organ grown fresh from a seed every run: five to eight chambers, with nests, patrols, ambush chambers that seal until they are cleared, and a gate that only one kind of cell can open.
- Six kinds of cell to ride, each with its own weapon and ability.
- Eighteen genes that stack and follow you from host to host, three strains of virus, and three difficulties.
- The dendritic cell at the end. Killing it seals the node, so you have to wear it down, leave your host, and take it bare.
- A strain tree and a codex between runs, so a lost run still buys something.
Win with all three starting viruses and you have seen everything this build has.
Getting it running
- Download the zip from the itch page. It is about 50 MB.
- Extract it: right-click the zip, choose Extract All, and put the folder wherever you keep games. It will not run from inside the zip.
- Run Obligate.exe in the Obligate folder. There is no installer and nothing is added to Windows.
Windows will probably say it "protected your PC". That blue box appears for any game from a studio too small to have bought a code-signing certificate. Choose More info, then Run anyway; it asks once. The itch app does all of this for you: Install, then Launch.
It needs Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, and it runs on integrated graphics. A controller works, and every action can be rebound.
What changed on the way out the door
The last week before release was playtests, and most of what changed came out of watching someone else play.
The sound was redone. Every cue is now a small set of takes played at random with a little pitch drift, so a gun fired forty times does not sound like one sample forty times. The shot has weight, and picking up DNA climbs a scale as you chain it.
The end of a run reads as a result. A playtester beat the boss and could not tell the screen from the one a death gets. A win now looks like a win, how far you got is a map of the organ you actually played with the chambers you walked lit up, and the two things to do next are buttons: spend the DNA you banked in the strain tree, or start the next infection.
It fits the screen it is on. Every window size the monitor can hold, and a display scale for small and very wide monitors.
A bug can be reported from where it happened. Report a bug in the pause menu opens the feedback page with your run attached: the seed, the chamber, the build.
What it is not yet
This is an early demo, not the full game. More organs, more cells and more bosses are still to be built; the organs drawn dark on the body map are where the full game goes. The sound and the balance are not final, and it is Windows only for now.
Tell me what broke
Feedback is the point of a demo. I am one person and I read everything.
- wickhouse.games/feedback takes bugs and opinions with no account.
- Report a bug in the pause menu does the same with your run attached.
- Comments on the itch page are open.
What I most want to know: where you got stuck, what you did not understand, and the moment you stopped playing.
How the game was made, including what was generated and what was not, is on the game's page.