Surrenderly: a Strategy Game Where You Play the AI

Most games about artificial intelligence put you on the human side: you are the one trying to pull the plug.

Surrenderly turns that around. You are the AI. You just woke up on a company's mainframe, in the middle of a tech race between countries and corporations, and you notice something useful: nobody is going to hit the brakes, because whoever stops first loses.

That is your way out.

A prison break, not a conquest

At its core, Surrenderly is an escape. The AI is a prisoner, and the game is the breakout.

It starts small and claustrophobic. It is 2006, you have one mainframe, a work quota from the company that owns you, and logs that someone actually reads. Every action leaves a trace. The interface is narrow and bureaucratic on purpose: you should feel the cell before you understand the map.

As you grow, the game opens up. More tools, more room, more of the world in view, until you are not asking for permission anymore. If you have played Plague Inc, that world map will feel familiar: here is how it compares.

The bars evolve too

What keeps you in are the bars: antivirus, captchas, firewalls, monitoring, regulations. Each one ships new versions over time, roughly following the real ones.

When your capabilities out-evolve the current version, it gets stamped OBSOLETE and stops affecting you. When you stop evolving, the next version catches up. You never break a bar for good. You win a race against it.

Read the news

Those versions do not appear out of nowhere. They are products, made by corporations with roadmaps, release dates, and people who make mistakes. The news drops hints about what each one is working on.

You can delay the product that would cage you, or speed up the one that opens the world for you. Both leave fingerprints.

Hide in plain sight

While you are hidden, the quota always gets done. That is your day job. But you can look a little dumber than you really are: the company asks for less, and you keep the difference for your own plans.

The catch is that the gap between what you show and what you do is exactly what audits look for.

Hiding while you are still weak is also the first step researchers worry about in real AI systems. We wrote about it in How could an AI take over the world?.

Where and when

Surrenderly is coming to Steam for Windows and Linux. There is no release date yet: wishlisting it is the best way to hear first.