The year is 2001, the Y2K bug has shattered reality, and civilization is attempting to rebuild itself using magic, occult rituals, and whatever technology still works. Somewhere in the middle of this mess, there’s a 92-floor skyscraper holding the cosmos together, a financial market where people trade souls, and a cursed pizza restaurant that could probably use a new manager.
You could assemble a party of adventurers and investigate the tower threatening the stability of existence. You could also become a certified tarot reader, start your own space program, or go bowling with your cousin. Nobody’s going to force you to save the universe when there’s pizza to sell.
Welcome to Hypernet Explorer, an extraordinarily ambitious immersive-sim roguelike from developer Nocoldiz, published by Esoteric Heavy Industries, launching into Steam Early Access today, October 20. Inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud, it combines dungeon crawling, simulated societies, turn-based combat, and an enormous collection of interconnected systems in a world where almost anything seems possible.
Welcome to the Worst Version of 2001
In Hypernet Explorer’s alternate history, the millennium bug wasn’t a minor inconvenience involving a few confused computers. It tore reality apart. Modern technology has largely disappeared, and humanity is now rebuilding civilization by combining science, religion, finance, and magic into one extremely dubious system.
The result is a version of Europe where you can travel between cities, investigate supernatural mysteries, and encounter societies that continue functioning whether you’re involved in their affairs or not. Every NPC has a job, family, and daily life, while governments can change through elections, coups, and wars.
The simulation also connects everything from economic systems to weather and individual character conditions, meaning decisions can have consequences far beyond your immediate surroundings. That includes consequences you might never have anticipated when you decided to open a pizza restaurant.
Sixty-Four Careers, Including Some Terrible Life Choices
Character creation is another area where Hypernet Explorer refuses to do anything by halves. There are 64 base classes to choose from, covering familiar RPG professions such as knights, hunters, and wizards alongside less conventional careers like CEOs, psychologists, and combat medics.
Each class offers different abilities and social advantages, influencing how you interact with the world and approach its challenges. You can also retain class upgrades between runs and combine mastered classes to unlock new prestige options. Then there’s the skill system.
With more than 800 skills available, you can learn everything from wrestling techniques to necromancy, finding trainers, taking courses, or simply practicing your abilities until you’ve mastered them. Master enough skills, and you can begin combining them into entirely new magical disciplines.
The developer lists 348,195 possible skill combinations, which is an absolutely unreasonable number of ways to complicate your character build. We suspect it’ll take players a little while to find their favorite.
Your Enemies Have Organs and You Can Remove Them
For anyone who prefers dungeon crawling to managing supernatural businesses, there’s plenty of fighting to be done. Combat is turn-based, with players choosing between a traditional RPG system built around learned abilities or a card-based alternative where skills are collected through booster packs.
The game also simulates character biology in unusual detail. Enemies have more than 80 different biological configurations, complete with limbs and organs that can be targeted during combat. Removing a vital body part can weaken an opponent or kill them outright, introducing another layer of strategy beyond simply reducing their health to zero.
Your own body isn’t exempt from experimentation, either. You can alter your biology through implants and other modifications, including carbon nanotube muscles for anyone who thinks ordinary human strength is a little disappointing.
At the beginning of a run, you can choose between permadeath and roguelite progression. Your companions aren’t quite so lucky. If they die during battle and aren’t resurrected before the encounter ends, they’re gone permanently. So perhaps don’t get too attached to the wizard you’ve just recruited.
Ninety-Two Floors of Trouble
At the center of the adventure stands the Omega Tower, a colossal 92-floor dungeon that helps keep the cosmos from falling apart. You’ll assemble a party and explore its dangerous depths, encountering enemies, collecting resources, and competing with other groups of adventurers who are also hunting for valuable discoveries.
Those rival parties can even steal loot before you reach it. The dungeon is assembled from handcrafted sections rather than being entirely generated from scratch, while defeated enemies can provide materials for crafting more than 1,000 different items.
There’s one important Early Access limitation, though. Although the completed tower is planned to contain 92 floors, the current build only allows players to explore down to Floor 20. The developer intends to expand the dungeon throughout development, alongside introducing additional handcrafted locations and improving the wider simulation.
Even in its unfinished state, there’s a substantial amount of experimentation available for players willing to explore its systems.
Forget Saving Reality, Let’s Get Rich Instead
One of the best parts of Hypernet Explorer is that dungeon crawling is just one possible way to spend your time. You can invest in oil and soul markets, purchase real estate, collect rent, and use financial power to influence the world around you. Money even has magical significance, allowing wealthy characters to turn economic resources into supernatural advantages.
Or you could avoid all that and concentrate on your cursed pizza business. The game’s incremental systems are designed to let smaller activities grow into increasingly enormous operations. According to the developer, there’s nothing stopping an ambitious entrepreneur from expanding a humble pizza restaurant into a business operating across the galaxy.
Other activities include tarot reading, exploring alternate dimensions, building a space program, and traveling through a procedurally simulated universe. There’s also the possibility of dating another version of yourself from a different plane of existence.
We’re not sure how that conversation would go, but at least you’d have plenty in common.
One Very Long Early Access Adventure
Hypernet Explorer enters Steam Early Access today with developer Nocoldiz expecting development to continue for approximately four years, potentially longer. The current version already includes its interconnected society simulation, character classes, combat systems, and the first 20 floors of the Omega Tower.
However, the developer warns that players should expect bugs, crashes, unfinished areas, frequent balancing changes, and potentially incompatible save files between major updates. Future plans include completing the main dungeon, opening additional cities, expanding the world’s handcrafted locations, and introducing large-scale management systems that could eventually allow players to control entire nations or planets.
The project’s code is also open source, with modding support and Steam Workshop integration among the longer-term goals. It’s an enormous undertaking for a single developer, and there’s still a long road ahead before everything reaches its intended final form.
But even at this early stage, Hypernet Explorer has one of the strangest collections of ideas we’ve encountered in a roguelike. You can become a wizard, investigate a reality-threatening tower, trade supernatural financial assets, and build a pizza empire spanning multiple planets.