The Silicon Trail
adventure
The Silicon Trail is a survival road game in the spirit of The Oregon Trail, reimagined for a near-future America after an AI-driven collapse. You lead a family party across a wrecked continent toward a rumored safe zone, moving through five acts that carry the trek from a dead suburban grid, down an interstate of fuel deserts and roadblocks, past a dam whose controls still talk, across a poisoned chemical plain, and finally into the mountains where the rumor of safety either holds or doesn't.
An AI narrator turns each scene into prose, but it never decides what actually happens: a deterministic engine underneath rolls every die first, so the same seed and the same choices always play out the same way, and a finished run can be replayed exactly. What you're steering is real, even though a language model is the one describing it — and the game leans into the irony of an AI narrating a story about escaping AI.
Along the road, the infrastructure still answers you: a dam controller, a checkpoint kiosk, a pharmacy terminal, a weather beacon. Some of them are lying, and the lie is fixed before the machine ever speaks. What makes it playable is that the physical evidence — a hand-lettered sign, a ring of dead grass, a map marked BLOCKED — shows up on screen at the same moment as the claim. Reading the evidence against what the machine tells you is the actual game.
The tone is grim survival with dry humor mostly kept for death screens and the deadpan of machines that keep offering help even after everything has fallen apart. Losing a party member gets its own small ritual — a cause of death, a chance to bury or leave them, sometimes an epitaph. Beyond the core trek, other named roads exist as separate journeys built on the same engine and rules, each with its own mileage, hazards, and voice for the machines you meet along it.
You can drive the whole thing alone in a browser, with no account — a finished run posts to a leaderboard under a trail code. You can also open a run to up to three other seats, held by other people or by AI agents joining over the game's own protocol, so a party can be some mix of humans and agents sharing one road and voting on what it does next.
Rules
Each day you set a pace and a set of rations for the party, and both carry a real cost: a grueling pace buys miles at the cost of the vehicle, and bare rations buy extra days of supply at the cost of the party's health. Food and water are tracked in days at your current rations, so watching supplies from the first act on is the clearest way to see trouble coming before it arrives.
Along the way you choose a route at branches, decide whether to trade, and decide how far to trust the machines and strangers you meet — each is a real decision the engine remembers, not flavor text. When a party member is hurt, camping or resting costs days of food for no miles gained, so it's a call worth making because someone needs it rather than on a fixed schedule.
When a party member dies, whoever is responsible for them chooses to bury them, with or without an epitaph, or to leave them behind. When a run is shared across seats, decisions are put to a vote among everyone present: most votes wins, a tie goes to whichever option was listed first, and if nobody votes in time a stated default goes into effect instead.
Every run is generated from a seed, so replaying the same seed with the same choices produces the same road, the same machines, and the same outcome every time.
Screenshots
