PRESS KIT

Bot Colony _redux is a story-based sci-fi adventure game. You advance in the game by speaking to robotic characters who answer intelligently or execute commands. Interacting with characters who understand you and have unique personalities and emotions is a highly immersive game experience.

Conversation – The main gameplay mechanic

Exploring the game world your way, using your own words, will feel like a liberating experience to players forced to click on choices in dialogue trees. It’s all about immersion: character intelligence, natural speech-to-text, and great-sounding, emotive text-to-speech.

A story-rich game

You’re hired by Nakagawa Corp, a large Japanese robot manufacturer, to catch a spy who broke into their sanctuary in Agrihan Island in the Pacific. While each episode contributes to the story arc, it feels like a stand-alone game with its setting and characters.

Intruder

Before giving you the mission, Nakagawa tests your abilities to command robots and to investigate.

Arrival

You land in Agrihan and face strangely acting robots, who’ve been updated with the 5th law of robotics (“Do As People Do”). You must deal with a crisis to continue your mission.

Riot

You fly a Hunter Bot to an abandoned oil rig. Programmed to behave like humans, the robots staged a mutiny and split into factions. You’ll alternate between playing a die-hard communist, a true believer in Capitalism, or a Greta-style environmentalist to get them to help you.

Our Humanity Test in Riot is a reverse of the Voigt-Kamp test in Blade Runner (1982 cult movie), used to tell humans from Nexus 5 androids. In our Humanity Test, robots kidnap YOU, and you must prove your humanity to survive and continue the adventure.

An atmospheric game

Agrihan Island was rendered in 3d to tell the story, and Unreal Engine 5.5 brings it to life in vivid colour. Our robots are carefully designed for their functions (the baggage bot, the Hunter bot, the welcome bot). In their quest to be like people, robots express their distinct personalities and emotions with emotive voices augmented by facial and gestural animation. Bot Colony comes with an original soundtrack.

Replay value

Because you use your own words and each answer depends on what you say, every game session is unique. There are many opportunities for replay – for example, there are 7 Humanity Tests, different styles to play the Intruder investigation. Our game relies on cloud services from Microsoft (Azure speech-to-text), OpenAI (gpt-4.1) and Elevenlabs (emotive text-to-speech) to provide a premium, immersive experience, which means we pay every time you talk to a character. The full game includes sufficient cloud credits to complete and replay to explore additional content. The game will come with a Steam wallet to enable players to explore the game beyond what’s possible with the standard resource allocation included in the purchase.

The making of Bot Colony _redux catches up with reality

Bot Colony (2014) is based on the Bot Colony book (2010), which anticipated conversation-capable robots with quasi-emotions. Bot Colony was the first game to use conversation as the main gameplay mechanic. However, in 2014, the technology wasn’t there to deliver on the vision of exploring the game world using your own words. We never gave up on the dream. Fast forward to 2025, Bot Colony was reborn as Bot Colony _redux, taking unrestricted exploration of the game world and characters to a new level, with immersive voice-in/voice-out gameplay.