The world you once knew is gone.
The bunker door hasn’t opened in five centuries. Your ancestors went underground during some massive war in the late 21st century, and now it’s your turn to see what the world became while your people were hiding.Shambles launched on Steam June 26thwith one of the most interesting setups I’ve seen in years: you’re not surviving the apocalypse, you’re discovering what came after everyone else already survived it.
Most post-apocalyptic games are obsessed with the moment everything fell apart. The bombs, the plague, the zombies, whatever. Shambles skips all that drama and jumps straight to the interesting question:given 500 years and a clean slate, what would people build?
The answer is apparently “a bunch of weird stuff nobody saw coming.” The continent of Eustea has over 100 different regions, each one rebuilt by people who had completely different ideas about how society should work. Some probably look familiar. Others went in directions that would confuse the hell out of anyone from our time.
Shambles Holds Power In Not Showing You Everything
Here’s where Shambles gets clever: it’s text-based. That sounds like a limitation until you realize what it means. When developers don’t have to model, animate, and voice-act every weird idea, they can actually have weird ideas. Want a society that rebuilt itself around principles that make no sense to outsiders? Easy to write,impossibleto budget for.
We’ve seen enough games where “different cultures” just means palette swaps and costumes. Text adventures let you encounter societies that think differently, not just look different. The format forces you to engage with ideas instead of just recognizing visual cues.
The exploration feels right because you’re just as confused as your character. You’re both outsiders trying to figure out how these places work, which makes the learning process feel way more natural than checking off map markers. You’re literally documenting this world as you discover it, building a field guide to civilizations that developed while your people were sleeping.
Building Your Identity Through Combat
The deck-building combat system does something smart with character progression. Your stats don’t just make you better at things - they change how your cards work entirely. A strength-focused character uses the same cards differently than someone who invested in charisma or intelligence.
With over 200 cards and 100+ skills and equipment pieces, you’re able to end up playing like a high-tech soldier, a medieval knight, a smooth-talking diplomat, or combinations that the developers probably didn’t anticipate. The system rewards experimentation over optimization, which is rare in games that give you this many options.
What I like is how your build becomes your approach to problem-solving, not just combat efficiency. Different character types see different options in the same situations. A diplomatic character might talk their way through conflicts that a warrior would have to fight through, while a tech specialist might find solutions that neither would consider.
Choices That Reshape Your Journey
Most games promise meaningful choices, then funnel you back to the same critical path regardless of what you picked. Shambles seems to follow through on the branching narrative promise. Your decisions can determine which regions you can access, which factions trust you, and how your entire expedition unfolds.
We also have multiple endings that have been very thoughtfully constructed. They end up being the natural conclusion of the path you’ve carved through the world. Maybe you end up brokering peace between two warring civilisations, or you pick a fight that ends up causing a post-apocalypse Brexit - how it turns out is anybody’s guess.
This connects to the exploration mechanics in interesting ways. Since you’re one of the first people to leave the bunker, you’re basically making the first map of what’s out there. Every weird culture you encounter, every strange creature you catalog - that’s all going into what becomes the official record.
Why This Works Out
When your premise is “explore a world that rebuilt itself while you were gone,” you’ve got natural motivation for discovery that doesn’t depend on perfect mechanics, and that is exactly why Shambles clicks for me. Not to mention that the 500-year gap lets them fully explore how societies might evolve when they’re not held back by our current assumptions about how things should work.
If you miss games that were built around interesting concepts rather than market-tested formulas, this is worth watching.Shambleslaunched June 26th on Steam, and it’s offering something different in a space that’s been pretty predictable lately.
What I’m most curious about is how they’ll handle all these different regions without everything starting to blur together. Creating 100+ unique societies is ambitious as hell, and I’ve seen plenty of games that started strong but ran out of fresh ideas halfway through. Still, the concept has me interested enough to give it a shot.
The bunker door is finally open. The question is whether you’re ready to see what humanity became while you weren’t looking.
