In a link provided during an April Fool’s joke the other day, we released a stealth announcement for 7388! Previously only known to Patrons, the news is now public: its development is restarting, and its name has now been changed to 7388.loving(Grace) (still known as 7388 for short).

7388 has undergone a lot of changes over the years, culminating in a very different story with an expanded cast. As revealed on the teaser site, the brand new summary is as follows:

Years after the end of everything, wake once more. In the middle of the wasteland formerly known as Gainesville, Florida, the server tower “Rhode S-32” holding a generative chatbot and data scraper is abruptly reactivated by a partially broken down companion android named Merope. At that exact moment, a survivor connects to Rhode and uses it as their eyes and ears. Stricken with amnesia, they must rely exclusively on what little is in Rhode’s local database and Merope’s spotty ability to move the server tower around on a push cart to gather information about the situation. To make matters more complicated, they can only communicate with Merope through the oft-hallucinating LLM that Rhode uses to construct sentences—and Merope, long disconnected from the humans that moderated her responses, is prone to bizarre conversation threads herself. The survivor’s sole comfort is Rhode’s 100-year-old video recordings of its teenage creator and her best friend, which they sift through whenever Merope has to charge. Their sense of identity slips and swirls with every moment they spend connected to Rhode, their goal of ”understanding” being the sole, flimsy anchor that maroons them to whatever remains of their self. With only 73.88 hours left of operation before Rhode’s complete hardware failure, you must make a choice: Do you learn from the past, or explore the reality of the present?

You can view the teaser site here and the updated Itch.io page here. We’ll be releasing new character designs every week on our Patreon and Subscribestar, so give them a shot! Both have free trial offers for the smallest tier if you’d like to check out what’s available before committing. And if you’re not interested in paying and are reading this from a spot other than our newsletter, then we recommend subscribing to get emails about public 7388 updates!