The Desolate Hope

About

The Desolate Hope is an indie RPG that switches between platforming, dungeon crawling, and turn-based combat. You navigate a decaying space station as Coffee, a service robot fighting a spreading virus by building and commanding digital allies. Platform sections involve jumping and shooting enemies while collecting resources to upgrade your squad. Mini-games shift to 8-bit overhead exploration for farming currency, leading up to mouse-driven JRPG battles against virus bosses. Progress revolves around balancing upgrades and managing limited resources to survive increasingly tough encounters. The game’s oddball mix of genres and its slow-burn story about a lone robot’s desperate mission stand out. Developer Scottgames crams multiple mechanics into one package, creating a niche experience that feels both ambitious and a bit unwieldy. Released in 2012, it’s a forgotten indie title with a distinct identity, though its fragmented design may not appeal to everyone. The narrative context gives weight to its repetitive resource loops, but the real draw is seeing how its hybrid systems clash and complement each other.

Storyline

On a distant edge of an unknown planet, an abandoned structure sits in silence. Constructed by an unmanned research vessel sent from Earth, the Lun Infinus station was designed to run simulations for a five year period, exploring possibilities of human colonization in the case that Earth became uninhabitable. Developed during an age of ambition and wealth, the project was quickly abandoned when interest faded in the following years. The last transmission from Earth occurred more than thirty years ago. The Lun Infinus station contained five sentient computers, Derelicts, built with certain levels of mobility in the case of emergency or need for relocation. Each of these Derelicts was to formulate their own plan for colonization based on thousands of hours of simulations. Given the amount of time that has passed however, the simulations have become very elaborate and bizarre. Meanwhile however, a mysterious computer virus has emerged. The virus of unknown origins has been slowly ravaging the Derelicts. Because of this, more and more CPU processing power has been needed for anti-virus measures, leaving less power for the simulations. Coffee is the last mobile resident of the station, a small service robot who spends his days keeping the station and the Derelicts operational as they perform their daily tasks. Since CPU power is slim, Coffee has been cutting corners to find ways around the virus. By using small subsystems and less vital CPU's scattered through the station in lesser devices, Coffee has designed a line of digital helpers, each simply called a D-Co, or "Digital Counterpart", to assist him in fighting the virus and keeping the station operational. Eventually the virus gets the best of each D-Co, and Coffee tries to create an improved D-Co using a different CPU. The latest is D-Co 9, built using the code of a simple computer game. Coffee dedicates his own CPU to be used for the main simulations, putting D-Co in charge of moving his body throughout the station, taking care of the needs of the Derelicts, and fighting off virus attacks when they occur.