Game Design • Development
No Place to Rest
A hand-drawn point-and-click game in which a child crosses a ruined city guided by a cat that glows brighter near contamination. Clean routes are gated by hostile architecture while contaminated ones lie open, so every choice trades exposure, energy, and the cat's trust as the evening closes in. Spans 47 illustrated scenes and 127 routes across three acts, with multiple endings and replays that open new paths.
Why it exists
A game about environmental injustice in which the danger is organised rather than natural: the clean routes through a ruined city are gated and watched, and the contaminated ones are simply open. A child crosses it guided by a cat that glows brighter near contamination.
What it does
- 47 hand-drawn scenes and 127 routes across three acts, with every ending reachable.
- Read, then commit: aiming the cat down a route costs energy, needs the cat's trust and works once per scene, so most choices are made half-blind.
- Three resources (exposure, energy and the bond with the cat), plus a hidden dose that never refunds.
- An evening that worsens the ground as time passes, told in words such as 'the light going', never as a countdown.
- Several endings. Each leaves flags behind that open paths on later runs.
How it's built
- A game-agnostic node-graph engine of resources, conditions, run state and a reducer. Game vocabulary is kept out of it by an ESLint rule and by a test that scans the engine's source.
- Mechanics are small pure reducer systems added to a list, such as reading a route, being refused at a gate, resting or the rising evening, rather than one large switch statement.
- Scenes render either as buttons or as a point-and-click picture whose clickable areas share the drawing's coordinate space.
- React and React DOM are the only runtime dependencies, and 248 checks run as plain Node scripts with a tiny assertion harness.