Bad Trip: NYC

About the Game

The city doesn't sleep. It hallucinates.

There is a rumor.

Everyone who walks into the witches' territory gets the first smoke free.

The second one you want.

And wanting, in this city, was never the same thing as choosing.

NEW YORK DIDN'T FALL. IT FOLDED.

Something opened a hole in the city's reality and the city — being New York — mostly kept going. People still order coffee. The sky has an eye. Cops file it under noise complaints. Nobody makes a big deal out of it, which is the scariest part.

Two of you go down toward The Source through streets, subways, catacombs and folds of the city that should not exist.

YOU DON'T CHOOSE WHEN. YOU CHOOSE WHAT.

There is no smoke button. There never will be. Its absence is the game.

The city decides when your hands start shaking. You get a few seconds of warning — a tremor, a whisper rising, the edge of the frame taking one breath — and then four stages you cannot cancel:

LIGHT IT. INHALE. THE TRIP CLIMBS. REALITY BREAKS.

Your weapon lowers. The camera stays yours. Whatever is walking toward you does not wait for you to finish.

THE TRUTH WINDOW

How deep you are decides what is real — for both of you, at the same time.

• NORMAL — the city as advertised.
  
• WITHIN — the Veil goes legible. You see what was always standing there.
  
• ABOVE — the noise. Creatures that were never born. A HUD that lies to you. TRIP LEVEL 87%. ENEMIES REMAINING: unclear.

Every real thing in this city has one tell it cannot fake. Copies never reproduce it. Reading tells is the skill — dying is not the teacher.

SCRAP-OCCULT

No catalogue, no clean steel. A traveler of this city fights with what the city coughs up: a rusty revolver, a nail SMG, a sawed-off, a pipe club, a candle molotov, a shotgun bong. Quiet violence buys time the loud kind can't — swing the club and the whisper slows down.

ONE COUCH, ONE TRUTH

Split-screen from the ground up. Complete alone.

Reality bends for the whole party at once. There is no version of this where you see the thing in the corridor and your partner does not. When you go down, someone has to kneel next to you and talk you back.

FEATURES

• Split-screen co-op FPS roguelike — two on one couch, and whole on your own
  
• You never choose when. The city schedules the ritual; you only pick what goes in it
  
• One couch, one truth — shared reality, never a private hallucination
  
• Three bands of real — NORMAL, WITHIN, ABOVE. The deepest band lies to your HUD
  
• Tells, not trial and error — every real creature carries one thing a copy can't forge
  
• Scrap-occult arsenal — what the city coughs up, witched out of a dumpster
  
• PS1 lo-fi, CRT glass, and a trip stack that changes what is true — not just what you see
  
• Comfort and photosensitivity options from the first build — intensity sliders, CRT toggle, shake toggle, whisper ducking

First one's free.

Nobody remembers the last one.