Latest Update – 17 March 2025

New information on Supported Platforms, Pricing and Subscription Information, and Backer Rewards have been added!

What is Beyond The Barrows?

Beyond The Barrows is a lofi hopecore text-based online game, where players can meet, chat, explore, and create – either alone or together.

The world is persistent and shared, which means if three friends build a castle in the middle of the forest, all of the other players will see the castle when they pass through that same part of the forest.

And the best part? Real-time translation is built directly into the foundation of the game, which means that you can chat, explore, and create with other players from all over the world even if you don’t share a common language!

What are The Barrows? What is Hopecore?

Hopecore is an aesthetic that centers hope and humanity. It invokes feelings of wholeness, community, hope, glee, and general happiness, and is in many ways the antithesis to the hyper-individualistic and capitalistic grind of the world, in which so many of us find ourselves trapped in our waking lives. 

The Barrows itself is a safe space that exists outside of time, somewhere between the edges of life and death, and everyone arrives there by a different path.  For some, The Barrows is the afterlife, for others merely a dream.  Some have found their way to The Barrows through gates or portals found in nature, while others have wrenched the door open by occult means and stepped through.

Regardless of how someone comes to The Barrows, they are equals here.  All are safe. All are welcome.

Why make a text-based game?

The world around us is loud, noisy, sharp, fast, and bright. Every moment of the day, there are a hundred things all competing for our attention, all vying to steal our focus and hold onto it for as long as possible with a constant stream of new and more and FOMO. For neurodivergent folks, it becomes even more overwhelming and overstimulating.

Yuck!

These days, there are precious few options to escape the noise. One reliable old standby is to bury ourselves in a good book, but that’s generally a pretty solitary activity, and sometimes we just don’t want to feel alone.

So we’re creating an online massive multiplayer game that is high community and low stimulation.

Low stimulation, however, can still include optional enhancements, like artwork and background music.

Why focus so heavily on the translation feature?

When the U.S. shut TikTok down and the Americans flooded Xiaohongshu (aka Red Note), something magical happened. Despite the language barrier, ordinary American people and ordinary Chinese people got to meet, talk, share stories, and learn about each other without any propaganda filters, and that brief unregulated cultural exchange had a profound impact on millions of lives.

That got us thinking about what a game world would be like if there was no language barrier. How much fun could it be to group up with a Bulgarian, a Swede, and a Japanese couple to explore a dungeon together? What better way to foster a sense of hope and community than to tear down the language barrier.

The real-time translation becomes even more potent when we pair that with the creation aspect of the game. Players can create places and things from the comfort of their native language, while those places and objects are immediately 100% accessible to other players regardless of language spoken.

By lowering the barriers for people from different countries and cultures to communicate, it opens the door to other opportunities. For example, it would be entire possible for a group of people to meet each other within the game world, travel to a tavern somewhere, grab a table, and then play a game of Dungeons & Dragons together. They could be from different parts of the world, not share a single common language, and it could even be that only thing these players may have in common is their love for Dungeons & Dragons, yet they would be able to find each other and share this passion all within the world of The Barrows.

In fact, there may even been some tools built in to the game to make this exact sort of scenario a little easier for everyone involved.

So, what IS the game? What do you do?

Beyond The Barrows has three core modes of gameplay:

• It is a classic text adventure game in the spirit of MUDs or Choose Your Own Adventure novellas. You move from place to place, interacting with people and objects you find along the way. Some places may have storylines to follow or quest chains to complete, while other places exist purely to enrich the game world and provide places to explore and travel through. While exploring, you will also discover and collect resources that you can use when creating items or places.
• It is a creative writing and journaling game. When you’re playing a video game and you reach the edge of the map, there’s usually some invisible wall or terrain feature that keeps you from going any further, and your only option is to turn around. But worlds don’t have to be like that. What if, when your character hits the edge of the world or an unexplored location, YOU get to tell the story of what comes next. In Beyond The Barrows, players are not only empowered, but encouraged to create. Every player has a home to define, describe, and to fill with objects and NPCs. As players explore and quest, their characters will obtain materials and designs to allow them to create and describe new and more interesting objects. Players can even come together on bigger works, such as guild halls, palaces, gardens, or even dungeons.
• It’s a social game. Specifically, the game world is a third-space, which can be incredibly valuable for people who may not have access to any in their waking lives. Every location in the game is its own chatroom shared with anyone else at that location.  Some locations are even dedicated to specific topics or activities, making it easier to find other players with shared interests.  Players can form temporary groups, more permanent parties, or even band together into full-fledged guilds.

How do you actually play the game?

Although this is a text-adventure style game, we live in a world of touch screens, trackpads, mice, controllers, and other assistive devices.  To make the game more fun and readily accessible to players of all capabilities and ability levels, we did away with the traditional terminal text prompt, and instead we made one key design choice.

Your character can inherently only do one action: INTERACT.

Every other action (going to another room, examining a bookshelf, cooking a stew, starting a conversation, crafting a tiara, cleansing a corrupt spirit, casting a spell, etc.) is attached to a “thing” of some kind, and you can perform any of those actions by interacting with the appropriate thing.

To move to another location, you interact with a GO thing.  That thing could be a doorway, a path, a ladder, or even a magic portal.

To cook a stew or craft a tiara, you interact with a CREATE thing, which could be a cauldron or a kitchen, a workbench or a warlock’s tome. 

A locked chest may not seem to have any actions attached to it, but interact with your lockpicks to UNLOCK the chest, and you may find that the chest can now OPEN.

Because the actions your character can take are not attached to the character themselves, your character isn’t limited by levels, restricted to classes, or burdened by anything of that nature.  The actions and capabilities of your character simply depend on where they are and what they have with them.

That also means that the game world of Beyond The Barrows isn’t limited to a single time, place, or genre.  Indeed, in the months and years that follow the launch of Beyond The Barrows, several new realms will open up for your character to experience and explore: Step from the Barrows into the grand fantasy realm of Illariskar filled with magic and monsters, attend a masquerade ball in one of the Storybook Realms, stop a fin de siècle secret society, solve a murder mystery, or partake in a space opera aboard an abandoned freighter out in The Void. 

Supported Platforms

Beyond The Barrows is being developed for broad cross-platform play.  

If funded, the scope of this Kickstarter project is to finalize development and release of Beyond The Barrows for play on Windows desktop only.

However, we are already developing fully compatible cross-play versions for MacOS on desktop and both iOS and Android on mobile that allow players on any of these platforms to see, play, and chat with each other.  Any funding beyond what is needed to release the Windows version will go directly toward development and release of these additional platforms.

We have also built Beyond The Barrows with an eye towards future console releases (e.g. on Switch / Switch 2 or PS5).

Purchase and Subscription Pricing

First and foremost, we aren’t doing this for the money.

The purpose and intent behind this project is to provide a service that supports a community. In fact, The Barrows project aims to be as close to zero-profit as we can make it. That means that if there’s a cost, that cost has a very specific (and transparent) purpose.

There are three ways through which we intend to sustain this game indefinitely: Account Creation Fee, Monthly Subscription, and an In-Game Store.  

Making this game zero-profit means that every euro that the project earns from purchases, fees, or subscriptions will be reinvested into maintaining and improving the game itself as well as go towards lowering the costs for players.

While the Account Creation Fee has a specific strategic purpose behind its pricing, our ultimate goal is bring the subscription price down as low as possible while remaining self-sustaining.  If in-game purchases ever reliably become enough to cover all of our operating expenses each month, we would love to eliminate the subscriptions entirely.

Account Creation Fee

Note: Several Rewards Tiers Remove This Fee Entirely For Backers

Rather than charging to purchase copies of the game, we are instead charging to create a fully cross-platform account that can be used on any devices where Beyond The Barrows can be installed or played.

To create a new account, we plan to ask for at most a non-refundable one-time fee of €39.99, which serves one very specific and important purpose: to discourage bots and trolls.

Having a per-account paywall not only means that bots and trolls will have to pay for the privilege of trying to ruin your day, but punishments like account bans carry more weight.  The initial fee also helps us to cover the costs of moderators and moderation tools to help enforce our Intolerance of Intolerance policy to ensure that The Barrows remains a safe space.

For players who are not bots or trolls, your account creation fee will actually be returned to you in the form of credit that can be used for purchases at the in-game store.

Lastly, in order to help keep the game affordable and accessible, we also plan to provide a number of different ways that legitimate players will be able to pay discounted rates to create their account.

Monthly Subscription

Note: Several Reward Tiers Provide Free Months Of Play

To keep The Barrows self-sustaining long into the future, we plan to ask for at most a modest €9.99 per month subscription fee.

However, our goal is to reduce that amount as much as possible as the game grows. It’s not a perfect ratio, but generally speaking the more active subscribers we have, the less each subscriber would need to pay to keep the servers running.

In-Game Store

Ultimately, we would like to be able to get rid of the monthly subscriptions entirely, but to do that we would have to have another wait to reliably pay the server bills.  To that end, we will be introducing an in-game store right off the bat.

The in-game store will largely feature three categories of items:

• Items of Convenience are things that you could come across in your travels, like raw materials, recipes, consumables, etc.  For players who have more money than time, such items are conveniently available for purchase, with all proceeds directly supporting the game.
• Items of Consequence make permanent and notable changes to the game world, such as Building Permits to add new rooms, buildings, neighborhoods, or even entire realms to the game world.  Such permanent expansions increase the resources needed by the servers to run the game, which the purchase price of such items offsets.
• Items of Magniloquence are items of a purely cosmetic nature.  We don’t want to give too much away, but suffice it to say, these items add a little aesthetic oomph wherever they are employed. 

Items in the in-game store are purchased using Trinkets, which are prized fragments of the world outside that have somehow tagged along into the Barrows.  Trinkets are most often received as reimbursement for the Account Creation fee, but they can also be purchased directly, or received as a reward for backing this project.

Backer Rewards

Closed Beta Invites

There will be a limited number of Closed Beta Invite rewards available during the campaign.  These Invites will grant you access to exclusive Closed Beta events throughout the lifetime of the game.  The first Closed Beta event is already scheduled for July 2025.

Free Account Creation

You will receive one or more unique one-time use codes that, when redeemed, allow to create an account without paying the Account Creation fee.

Free Subscription Months

You will receive one or more unique one-time use codes that, when redeemed, credit your account with a free month’s subscription.

Trinkets

You will receive Trinkets, which are the currency for purchasing items of convenience, consequence, or magniloquence from the in-game store.