An-pêng: Still Here

The war reaches Anping, in the city of Tainan.

An emergency broadcast comes through on your phone. Everyone is to evacuate inland. You can't be bothered to go out, and you don't much like crowds, so you decide to stay in.

Next morning you open your eyes and you're still alive. Outside the window everything is chaos. The power is out, and whatever was in the fridge has probably turned.

That's where the game starts.

There's no base to defend and no fighting your way out. What you have to do is far more ordinary: stay alive one more day, in an apartment with no electricity, on whatever you can turn up by going through drawers.

This isn't a game about a hero. It's a game about the person who didn't leave — why they didn't, whether they still could, and how to get through the next few hours.

Only a few cards in front of you

Along the bottom of the screen sit a handful of action cards, and they change with where you are — the bedroom lets you sleep, the kitchen lets you go through the cupboards, the temple lets you cast the moon blocks. All you do is decide what the next stretch of time gets spent on.

Status, Resources, Quests and Notes, top left, are for looking. Pressing them costs no time.

• Search — go through the room. There are cans in the kitchen cupboard, but you'll need to find the can opener first. Until then a can is just a sealed tin.

• Move — walking from the bedroom to the bathroom takes a few minutes. Taking the stairs down from the tenth floor is another matter entirely. The lift doesn't work; there's no power.

• Eat, drink, sleep — a salty can will leave you thirstier. Sleeping saves your game, and puts you through a whole night at your most vulnerable.

Every action card spends in-game time, and how much it spends is decided by the thing itself — opening one drawer and descending ten flights of stairs are not the same errand. An older body takes longer over the same walk than a young one, and longer still when it can barely stand.

Time is the only genuinely scarce thing here. Your body will not wait for you.

What you're up against isn't a who — it's eight numbers going down

Health, fullness, thirst, energy, body temperature, injury, mood, hygiene. Each falls at its own pace, and none of them is a case of "higher is better": eating until you're stuffed is as much a problem as passing out from hunger. Every one of them has a comfortable range.

The weather won't cooperate either. Full four-season simulation: the gap between day and night temperatures, rain that settles in for days, a typhoon that arrives without warning. Nobody gets to predict tomorrow. Whatever you wake up to is the weather you get. When it rains, it really rains out there, and the drops run down the lens.

When it's cold, a down jacket is worth far more than a can of pineapple.

Taiwanese

Taiwanese is a language a great many people in Taiwan speak every day. Speaking it takes no thought; writing it down or reading it is where most people get stuck. There was a generation that was fined and made to wear a sign for speaking Taiwanese at school, and what survived that was the speaking, and only the speaking.

This game's dialogue is written in Taiwanese Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ), a romanised orthography. Choose Taiwanese and you can pick a second language to run alongside it: POJ on top, the one you can read underneath. If you speak it but can't read it, you can match the sounds up as you play. If you don't speak it at all, you still know what you're reading.

Supported languages: 繁體中文, English, 日本語, Deutsch, and Taiwanese (Pe̍h-ōe-jī).

You decide who you are in the opening minutes

At the moment you wash your face and look in the bathroom mirror — young / adult / older, male / female, six combinations. Different bodies start in different places.

You get stronger after that. Carrying things, walking a long way, forcing yourself to stay awake — anything you do might build up some part of you a little. Get stronger and you can carry more; build stamina and the same job tires you less.

Who you turn into depends on what you have actually done these last few days.

What you can carry, and what you can't

Supplies have weight, and you have two hands, one backpack, and perhaps a cart. What to take and what to leave behind is a trade-off you are forced into at every turn.

An expired packet of curry is both a liquid food and an expired item. Whether you eat it is your call.

That raincoat won't make you warm. What it guarantees is that you won't get soaked through — and being soaked makes your body temperature fall much faster.

Step outside and things happen

Out in the open, a chance card sometimes turns up. When your luck is bad, it's a robber.

Run, hide or fight — that's your call. Fight, and you sit down at a card table. Your deck is your body: your strength, your fighting, whether you've eaten. The bat in your hand becomes a card too, and the more you use it, the sooner it breaks. The cards come in three kinds — Strike beats Grab, Grab beats Guard, Guard beats Strike — and both sides turn theirs over at once.

If you'd rather not sit through it, you can just get it over with in a single roll.

Luckier people run into robbers less often, and the ones they do meet are hungrier.

Moon blocks

Heng-hô Temple is still standing. There's nobody inside, but the moon blocks are still on the altar.

Carry a peace charm and you can cast the blocks there, asking the god to bless it. It takes three siūⁿ-poe in a row — a yes, a yes, a yes. One laughing pair or one no, and you start again. Where the blessing lands and how much it gives is up to the god.

A charm from another temple works too. It's just harder.

There is nobody to ask

There are no NPCs in this game. From beginning to end, the only voice you hear is the protagonist talking to himself.

Hidden in the rooms are note fragments, and the only way to turn one up is to search. They tell how this war got to where it is — the announcements, the notices, the days that were once entirely unremarkable. Every place you've been stays in your notes too, one instant photo at a time.

None of it affects whether you survive. You can go a whole playthrough without finding a single one and still get through every day.

But you will not meet anyone you can actually talk to in this game, and the fragments are the only way you'll come to know any of them. Whether the protagonist stops to finish reading is itself part of who he is.

About the name

Anping is a district of Tainan, and the place where this story happens.

Read its two characters the other way round and you get 平安 — safe, unharmed, having come through it. A place name that also happens to be a wish.

An-pêng, set alongside the title, is how those two characters sound in Taiwanese, written in Pe̍h-ōe-jī. It isn't Mandarin romanisation; in Mandarin the same place is Anping.

About the artwork

The scenes start as photographs taken on location — the lanes of Anping, the stairwells, apartment courtyards. Each one is then worked over: removing things that shouldn't be in the frame, commercial branding, anything touching on someone's privacy, before being stylised into animation by AI.

Every single one took a long time.

The interface is made by hand, one piece at a time: the notebook, the dialogue box, the card table. The rest is still being replaced.

Where development stands

This is a project in development, currently made by one person.

The core systems are running — time, weather, status resolution, supplies, story, quests, chance cards and the card table are all in place. You can already get out of the building: the courtyard, the lane, and nine places in the streets around it. Early Access will keep going further out, with all of Anping as the goal.

Most of the interface is still engine-default parts. The notebook, the dialogue box and the card table have already been replaced with hand-made ones; the rest will follow during Early Access.

Early Access is planned for late 2026.

“What was in the fridge has already gone off. A while longer won’t hurt.”