Simulation: Over

Equipped with a strong shield, you take on the role of a pilot. Your mission: reach the exit. However, there is a catch: your shield may only take a single hit, after which you are defenseless. Later in the game you discover that you are in possession of a “temporal drive”, which the computer engages automatically to reset your mission. Also, upon completing your missions, you start to realize that your situation it is probably not what you thought.

The main menu music mixes electronic and orchestral elements with a lot of reverb (using Valhalla Supermassive) to create a mysterious space ambience. It has some heroic elements as well reflecting the stakes of pilot’s missions in the game. The last part is reused in the “You won” track.

Ingame, there are two main tracks, each with a transition/intro. The first intro is complemented by voicelines (recorded by our team member Lukas who kindly provides his angelic voice for our games :) on the conversation between the captain and the ship’s computer. Tha latter I obtained by applying a vocoder to make the voice more female and robotic. This intro fades into the main “battle theme” that plays in a loop as long as the shields are up.

Once the spaceship is hit, the shields go down and a beat kicks in. Funnily, in our play testing, this lead to players taking on a harder challenge and loosing their shields on purpose just to have the “cooler music”. This is again complemented by a conversation, in which the pilot tries to, unsuccessfully, divert power.

The soundtrack for the game “Simulation: Over” was created within the 48h window of the Mecklenburg Vorpommern easter game jam 2026. The topic was: “the last warning”. Optional challenges were as follows:

1. Impossible: The game is extremely difficult to beat.
2. Glitches: What feels like a bug at first, turns out to be an intentional feature
3. Backwards: The game (partially or in full) plays out in reverse.
4. Ding Dong Dang: The sound settings or audio elements have a direct influence on the gameplay.

We implemented (3) through the time-traveling reset device which resets the pilot to start over when their mission failed. Also, it turned out (1) happened accidentally: it is very difficult! Finally, given what we observed, (4) is also fulfilled by players trying to get hit on purpose to influence the soundtrack.

You can play the game on Itch.io.