There's a card in 'All Will Rise' that just says: "we're fucked."

It's a small, blunt joke buried inside a game about climate collapse, colonialism, and corporate power — and it tells you almost everything about the project's philosophy. This is not a game interested in performing seriousness. It wants to be honest about how bad things are, and just as honest about how much joy, humour, and community can exist alongside that fact.

All Will Rise, designed by Speculative Agency began, improbably, in a meeting room in the Netherlands. The game's science and impact director, Joost Vervoort was working as a civil servant and academic when they sat in on a Dutch activist group preparing a legal case to force one of the world's largest pension funds to divest from fossil fuels. Watching that kind of sharp, driven organizing in action sparked a question: what could games actually do to support work like this? That question became a pitch, the pitch found collaborators on Twitter before the platform's implosion, and the team — scattered ans largely strangers to each other beforehand — started building.

They always imagined the project as episodic, unfolding in different cities and countries over time. But they chose to start in the Global South deliberately, because in that context, environmentalism can't be cleanly separated from inequality or indigenous rights the way it often is in Western discourse. As Meghana Jayant, the Narrative Director of the game put it, "...it's not treated as a 'liberal elite issue' the way it often is in the West — it's literally life and death."

All Will Rise is set in Muziris, a speculative city modeled on Kerala. The idea didn't come from research first — it came from a personal shock. Jayant, , described visiting family land in Kerala only to find it had vanished entirely, "My mom's family is from Kerala, and just before we started working on this, I'd gone on holiday with some family friends to see their family home — except we couldn't see it, because of coastal erosion caused by a port expansion project nearby. Their ancestral land no longer existed; it was underwater. That felt shocking and horrifying — it's one thing to visit your great-grandfather's home and find it's now a mall, but for it to no longer exist at all is different."

That specific, visceral loss — rather than the broad vocabulary of "climate change" or "ecocide" — became the emotional center of the game. A river bursting into flames, one of its central images, came from wanting audiences to feel something concrete rather than absorb another abstraction.

That instinct toward specificity shows up everywhere in the game's visual language. The team, especially Yuvraj Raj, the Lead Environment & Character Artist was intentional while creating the world of the game. They vehemently avoided the generic, flattened "idea of India" that a lot of games default to. They knew an everyday story needed an everyday look. Every single part of the game: an elephant motif on a dupatta-style drape lifted straight from Kerala tradition, feels so specific that anyone from the region would recognise them. But there is something mystical and otherworldly about the art as well. For instance, tucked into the opening scene's burning-river imagery, come clouds shaped like a grasping hand; a nod to Kerala's folk mysticism.

The team is also allergic to the idea of representing one 'authentic' version of a place. As Jayant, there's no single Kerala; no single India — even people from the same city live it differently — and the pressure to become a singular mouthpiece for a whole country, especially when writing for Western audiences, is one they've actively pushed back against. Instead, the game leans on its central card mechanic, which lets a player-facing prompt be answered by four or five different characters, each with a different, sometimes contradictory, response — a structural rejection of any single fixed narrative.

Ask the team what they hope players take away, and the answer isn't a message about doom. It's an argument that civil society — organising, showing up, being part of something — can be genuinely joyous, and that this joy is not naive. Vervoortr is writing a paper on the distinction between being serious and being sincere: you can care deeply about something, even fight for it, without collapsing into performed solemnity. The team pointed to how media often paints activist spaces as puritanical and humorless, when in practice they're full of disagreement, creativity, and fun — and argued that the political right has understood the pull of community and joy far better than the left has, building real power on "come be part of something, it's fun." All Will Rise is, in part, an attempt to reclaim that ground.

After signing Microsoft as a funder, the team learned that Microsoft had become a priority target of the 'No Games for Genocide' boycott and divestment campaign. They ultimately returned the funding and pledged not to release the game on Xbox at all — a bigger sacrifice, by their own account, than the money itself, given how much it limits their reach as a small indie studio. It wasn't a comfortable or uncomplicated call; nearly every major tech company is entangled in the same climate and political failures, and the team was candid about the impossibility of boycotting everyone while still making a commercial game. But they wanted to be public about it, on the theory that small, visible stands can give other people in the industry permission to have the same conversations at their own workplaces.

The team is clear-eyed about the environment they're releasing into. Getting people to sustain attention on anything — let alone a game about port mismanagement and ecological collapse — has become genuinely difficult, as we're caught between algorithm-driven platforms and a flood of AI-generated content that's made audiences suspicious of even real, human-made work.

Underneath all of it is a fairly simple bet, that big, crushing systems — financial instruments, global supply chains, corporate power — become easier to actually engage with once they're broken into something an ordinary person can hold, laugh at, and feel; not a lecture; not a documentary. And that's what All Will Rise tries to do.

Follow Speculative Agency on Instagram for updates about All Will Rise and check out their demo on Steam.

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