How it works

What this is

Tumbleweed is a text game about someone else’s life. Earth in the 2200s, the sky closed off by a blockade, eight cities, and people in them doing what people always do: working, quarrelling, renting rooms, saving up for something of their own.

You cannot steer the hero. There is no “walk” button, no “fight” button: they decide, hour by hour, on their own. Your part isn’t the hands — it’s the voice. You set a character, weigh priorities, and give an order; the hero hears you, and still does things their own way more often than you’d like.

It reads like a serial novel: open it, read what has happened, tweak a setting, close it. There’s no need to sit in the game.

How to read it

The diary runs by the hour. An entry is an episode of the hero’s life, timestamped: a shift at the port, a fight by the bar, a night under someone else’s roof. Hours arrive on their own while you’re busy with your day; check back tomorrow and you’ll read a whole day at once.

The world does not pause. While you’re away, the hero keeps living — that’s the main difference from games where nothing happens without a player at the wheel.

The wording is picked fresh each time. Underneath every hour lies a plain fact: who, where, what was lost and what was found. The description on top of it is written anew — some of the scenes are voiced by a language model. That’s why two identical hours read differently for two heroes, and why the whole game reads equally well in Russian and in English.

Orders

An order is a goal, put into plain words. There’s no menu: on the Strategy tab there’s a field, and you write what you want (“save up for a home of your own”, “fly to Istanbul”, “get hold of a gun”), and the game parses it into a goal it knows how to check for completion.

Parsing takes time: the idea “drifts through the ether” for a while, sometimes until morning. Then the order shows up as a line on Strategy, and its outcome lands on the Milestones tab.

An order doesn’t command. It tilts the odds: under a “save up” goal the hero takes shifts more often and sits down to dice less — but they don’t turn into a machine for earning. They still eat, sleep, get distracted, and get into trouble.

A hero can hold one goal at a time. While it’s open, you can’t set a new one — you can drop the old one, and the hero will cross it out and go back to living their own way.

Sometimes an order is scaled back. If the hero isn’t ready yet for what’s being asked, or doesn’t have what they’re meant to sell — you’ll get a refusal with a reason. And too big a reach gets trimmed down to something reachable: a goal that would take years would sit in the one spot you have and change nothing.

Strategy

There are two levers, and both change how likely things are, not what happens.

Character is four pairs of extremes: cautious or reckless, peaceable or quarrelsome, generous or tight-fisted, level-headed or a gambler. An extreme setting roughly multiplies the pull toward some activities by half again, and roughly halves the pull toward others.

Priorities are a hundred percent of attention, split between craft, earning, travel, and company. What counts are the proportions: give one direction twice the weight of another, and that’s how the hero splits their attention — whatever’s left unassigned follows the same proportions. A direction that holds all the attention pulls the hero several times harder than usual.

But your levers aren’t the only thing deciding. Standing next to them are the hero’s own traits, their backstory and trade, the district they sleep in, the weather outside, and plain fatigue from repetition: the same activity, taken a second time in one day, already pulls about one and a half times weaker, and a third time more than twice as weak. So extreme settings give a tilt, not a script.

Money and a roof

The hero eats twice a day and sleeps somewhere. That’s their first line of expenses, and the first reason they go to work at all.

A room is arranged without you. In any city the hero looks for a place to sleep that matches their money: with an empty pocket it’s a shelter, then a bunk, a room, an apartment in a decent district. The better the room, the calmer the night, and the faster wounds heal. They don’t move for every extra coin — the difference has to become noticeable.

A home of one’s own doesn’t sell in every city. Where the market exists, the hero can end up with a pod, a house, or an apartment: the price of the place decides the kind, the district decides the exact sum. It won’t leave them penniless — some money is always held back for living.

After that, the home lives a life of its own. While the owner is away, the place is let out, and the tenant pays half the usual rate. The place wears down and gets repaired; every so often someone breaks in — more often in the slums than in a clean district, and more often during unrest than on a quiet night. The furnishings can be upgraded: it’s expensive, and it shows.

What to try

If you’re not sure where to start, here are two experiments. Neither one breaks anything: you can always drop an order and give another.

What the game doesn’t do

The hero doesn’t die. A truly bad day ends not in the end of the story, but in a blackout and a new trait — a scar. You can let a hero go and start over; losing one for good in a fight, you can’t.

The game doesn’t take money. No purchases, no ads, no paid shortcuts: what you’re reading is everything there is.

And the game doesn’t know the truth. Send the hero to find out who closed off the sky, and they’ll gather a handful of incompatible versions and choose what to believe. There is no right answer: it isn’t hidden — it doesn’t exist.