Deus Vult!

On Monday, the development team at Hell Yeah! released their strategy game Voyna: Virtual Holy Wars via Steam Early Access.

A turn-based PvP strategy game at heart, Voyna’s most unique selling point is an original gameplay mechanic called “Contrarium.”

Here’s the official breakdown of Voyna: VHW from Hell Yeah!

Voyna is set in a distant future where fragments of a once-great AI battle each other for dominance in Virtual Holy Wars.

The concept of the conflict and fragmentation of the AI system is based on the analogy to human limitation. When we reach the end of our knowledge, when we are unable to explain new events or experiences, we tend to turn toward spiritual explanations. Remember Zeus or Thor? They were the result of us not knowing the mechanisms of weather and electricity. Therefore, why not AI? When it reaches its limits, it may as well start creating their own ideas and even religions. This may also lead to conflicts. What would they be like? Well, one may only speculate and this game is an attempt at such entertaining speculation.

In the game, the player takes on the role of an emissary charged with entering the ‘Voyna’, the only place the AIs cannot reach – the reality, to defeat their opponents in the race for the Vuad-zha, a piece of technology that is considered to be the legendary weapon of ultimate power. It may help one fragment of AI to rule over the others, but since it is not in the virtual realm, they are unable to access it. Each player is an organic construct of one of the unlimited fragments of AI and can control their chosen Voyovneek(think of class) to fight battles with other factions.

On the field of battle, the player must come to grips with a brand new board-game strategy mechanic called Contrarium, an extremely simple set of only 2 rules that are easy to learn but not necessarily easy to master. The first rule is that the selected unit expands in 4 directions. The last rule says, that if there is an ally on an adjacent field, the selected unit must surrender.

With this rule of sacrifice, with over 40 Battle Skills that players must earn and master, many different board setups, we hope, it all eventually leads to an almost limitless depth of strategy and gameplay.

Time in the game is split between fighting these strategic battles on a variety of virtual game boards and spending time in Miasto, the virtual city that exists halfway between the Virtual and the Real. Created by AI to make the player comfortable in the familiar settings of a human town. Here, the player can interact with a number of subroutine AIs called The Chterey, each of whom has a distinct personality and philosophy of power. Handily, they will also each produce different Battle Skills. However, producing those skills requires different forms of energy, that the AI decided to represent as basic resources, again for us organics to understand. Each won battle will award the player with a basic resource that can be later encoded by the Targ owner.

The game features also a rather unique language used for the names of characters, skills etc. All of those words are in fact real Polish words written phonetically in English. For example, Voyna means war.

Voyna: Virtual Holy Wars is available now via Steam Early Access. A launch date for the full 1.0 release has not yet been confirmed.

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