At the centre of everything there is a ship: the Santa Maria, an old-generation interstellar cargo vessel, registration number 1972. Not a space-opera starship, no battles and no light blades: a home you return to every night, a workshop, a shell. On board, one man: William T. Eriksonn, a merchant pilot, alone not out of spite but by choice, and he pays the full price of that freedom. Around him grew a cycle of reflective science fiction: three stories about solitude, about memory, about what we leave to the stars.
The experiment: Il Relitto Silente
The first version had nothing to do with ships and went by another name. It was called Il Cavaliere e il Drago ("The Knight and the Dragon"), it was built inside Google AI Studio, and under the hood it hid an idea that seemed as modern as anything at the time: hand an artificial intelligence the job of invisible dungeon master, let it invent the rooms, the inventory, the answers to whatever the player came up with. It worked. It had no soul. Every description resembled every other one, and the control that belongs to whoever is writing ended up in the hands of the algorithm's unpredictability. That prototype was thrown away.
What replaced it was artisanal science fiction: a static engine, every text written and rewritten by hand, every puzzle chiselled. That is how, in 2026, Il Relitto Silente ("The Silent Wreck") was born, a text adventure in Italian. Black screen, blinking green cursor, commands typed word by word, like on the phosphor terminals of the eighties. William approaches an alien wreck adrift at the edge of the solar system, dead for millennia. Inside he finds the echoes of a vanished civilisation, and the trace of someone who passed through long before him.
The heart of the game was its Italian parser, written from scratch: "the parser is the game". Il Relitto Silente was completed, released for free on Windows, macOS and Linux, and finally made open source: you can still play it today. And it was not Runtime's only green-phosphor experiment: there is also The Safe Place Chronicles, a post-apocalyptic survival RPG, likewise free and open source.
The short story: Frequenza di Servizio
The text adventure, however, had a stated limit: William was little more than a camera on a tripod. His story needed a soul. To give it one, Simone Pizzi wrote Frequenza di Servizio ("Service Frequency"), a short story that starts from a private ritual: listening to the background radiation, every now and then, to confirm you are alone. Until, out of the white noise, comes a girl's voice talking about rain, shopping lists, traffic lights. Things that do not exist in space. Where that voice comes from, and what it asks, is the heart of the story.
Today: The Mystery of the Santa Maria
The cycle closes where it began: aboard the ship. The Mystery of the Santa Maria is a hybrid that recalls the old graphic-text adventures, with text at the centre and images as stage sets, and a verb interface that pays tribute to the era of Lucasfilm Games: LOOK, TAKE, USE, OPEN, TALK…
The Santa Maria has ninety-nine years of service, and the law allows no argument: mandatory decommissioning. William must dismantle his own home piece by piece. But a ship this old has passed through many hands, and as he takes her apart, things begin to surface that someone, long ago, meant to keep hidden. The game is in development, and you can follow it version after version in the devlog.
How it is made
That story about the dragon is the first chapter of a craft. Ever since, every Runtime project has also been an experiment on a single question: how far can one person working alone get, if instead of a team they have a language model writing the code. The Safe Place was openly born for that, to carry a non-trivial video game all the way to the end with the help of an LLM, and it got there after two years, one whole branch abandoned halfway and a botched rewrite that had duplicated fourteen functions and left the project on the floor for weeks. Anyone who thinks this way of working is a shortcut has never spent a weekend figuring out why an engine no longer compiles.
Out of those disasters came a discipline, and the discipline was put in writing. There is a nine-article pact between the human operator and the model. The design documents are the only source of truth, and whatever is not written down does not exist. The model is forbidden to take initiative, to propose changes nobody asked for, to invent functions nobody ordered. Before every significant change the state of the project is frozen in a document whose purpose is to make a regression recognisable when it arrives. It is a contract written by a human being who had already wasted enough time.
The method that came out of it fits in one line: the direction is human, the execution is assisted. The Santa Maria existed on paper long before it existed on screen, in a design document of over three hundred pages that fixes the ten rooms of the ship, the eighteen nodes of the plot, the eight puzzles with all their conditions and the five hundred lines the actors would later record. When the model writes the code, currently Claude Opus 4.8 and Fable 5, and other models before them, it is not inventing the game: it is building it on a plan already decided, line by line, with a numbered version and a work note for every single change. Then the code gets read back, because the model makes mistakes. It cites commands that do not exist and documents functions it never wrote. It leaves behind pieces that nobody runs and nobody notices, until one day something breaks. Finding those things is half the job.
One clarification, because it matters. The images in this game are generated. Nothing else is: the voices belong to real people shut in a room in front of a microphone, the music is composed, and every word you will read on board was written and rewritten by someone who put their name to it. Artificial intelligence has not diluted the authorship of this project. It has moved where that authorship applies: the person who signs it no longer types every line, but decides what exists, how it works and what it means. Which has always been the job of whoever designs.
Who is behind it
One person writes, draws and programs the game. The sound, however, is not a solo act: the original music is by Alirio Bruni, and the characters will have real voices. Leonardo Tomassetti is William, Olivia Quattrocchi is Akkaya, Deborah Piu is Berg, and Simone Pizzi voices Yusuf. All of them offered their work for free. The project's real costs are the multimedia assets, the images and video generations that give the ship its face: that is what donations are for, if you feel like helping.
The cinematic sequences that open the game are the work of Alex Raccuglia; Michela De Paola is executive producer.
Soon Il Relitto Silente, Frequenza di Servizio and Il Mistero della Santa Maria will be collected in a book: the full novellas, lightly revised for publication, gathered in a single volume available for purchase. We will let you know here and in the devlog when the book is ready.