Redlander is a post-apocalyptic prologue to a grand adventure

A track-wheeled vehicle, The Redlander, trundles across the wastes, its only crew an anxious gremlin and the machine’s AI, CORE.

So many Bitsy games go down the route of interactive poetry or trying to capture a moment in time, or memory, within a short, multi-screen experience. I’m completely taken aback with some of the clever steps beyond the engine’s normal capacity which have been made to bring Redlander to life.

First, let’s take a step back though. Redlander revolves around a still grieving, gremlin who is the only living being left alive in the titular craft. The grieving is because that’s only recently changed. Their grandfather, the engineer who managed to bring the vehicle back into use, has recently died, and the plans to build a new crew in order to help the expedition all failed miserably. In fact, they had to leave in quite a rush.

As with most recently revived ancient-technology there are inherently a few problems. Even with the recent outfitting for (dormant) crew quarters and the conversion of the observation deck into a garden, there was still a lot of work planned for the craft – that’s before some of the potential issues that come of exploring a ruined wasteland.

Redlander is currently just a single chapter experience, something that the developer, Sunspider, is looking to change. It can be completed in a short, single sitting but I do hope, from want is already on show, that it does go on to become the episodic journey that the developer has indicated they’d like it to.

You can play Redlander for free over on itch.io. It’s browser-based, so you can play it on basically any OS.