The game
You take a job at the most trusted charity on Earth and move into its company town. The work is real. The neighbours are kind. You can spend forty hours decorating your kitchen.
You can also be erased from existence in your sleep.
Providence sits alone offshore, far enough out that you eventually stop checking whether you can see the mainland. There is no road, and nowhere to build one.
The Foundation is the island.
The houses. The clinic. The company store. The constable's office. The ferry terminal. The call center whose lights never go out. And a small building for quiet reflection that nobody is permitted to call a chapel. There is a curfew, and the Foundation calls it a wellness policy.
You are given a house. You are given meals, medicine, and work that genuinely matters. Nobody asks you for money and after a while you stop carrying any. Everyone is kind to you immediately and without reservation. Most of them mean it.
The ferry sails on the company timetable. Leaving is never forbidden — it is simply not sailing today.
This is the part people get wrong about the premise, so it goes first.
The Foundation's charitable work is real. The wells exist. The vaccines reach people. The children in those homes are genuinely better off. The accounts are clean and they have always been clean.
There is no scene where you discover it was all a lie, because it was not all a lie. Nobody here is a villain enjoying themselves. They are a functioning institution that does enormous good and has made an arrangement to pay for it — and every person you meet has decided, on balance, that the arrangement is worth it.
There is no comforting revelation that the charity was a fraud — no hidden ledger, no room where everybody finally admits they were monsters. The good is real. So are the secrets, and the lies, and the people who stop being mentioned.
The difficult question is not whether the Foundation deserves to exist. It is how much you are willing to forgive because it does.
Everyone on Providence has already answered that, one way or another. Sooner or later you will too.
Nothing is wrong with Providence when you arrive. But not everything is quite right.
The corridor to the Call Center takes a little longer than it did yesterday. A colleague thanks you for helping her with something you did not do — she laughs, and you laugh too. In an old newsletter you find a photograph of the harvest supper and recognise a man who introduced himself to you last week, except the issue is eleven years old, and dates get printed wrong, and people resemble people.
There is a reasonable explanation for every one of these. Most of the time the reasonable explanation is the true one.
Nothing is ever confirmed. The game will not tell you that you saw something, and nobody you ask will tell you either — not because they are lying, but because most of them genuinely have not noticed, and the few who have stopped mentioning it a long time ago.
Providence never asks you to believe something impossible. It only asks you to decide which memory you trust.
Every thread you pull is one you chose to pull. You can stop whenever you like. Most people do. One colleague’s account of their first month →
Steal, surveil, plant, bribe, blackmail, report, burn, kill. Every choice the game gives you, it gives to everyone.
A sufficiently motivated neighbour can follow you home, search your house while you are on shift, notice which floorboard you check every morning, or learn which constable you paid. Not through a scripted event — through the same systems you are using on them, running whether or not you are looking at them.
Providence is several hundred people with their own ranks to climb, their own debts and their own things worth hiding. You are the newest person in it. Some of them have been doing this for a very long time and are better at it than you are.
Nobody is protecting you because you are the protagonist. There is no such category.
Hit your quotas. Thank your givers and mean it — the game can tell. Get promoted slowly, properly, the way the Foundation intends. The straight path genuinely reaches the truth. It is not a trap and it is not a joke.
It costs control. You learn on their schedule, in the order the job chooses, while the story moves without asking you.
Find them, verify them, hide them, protect them, and spend them on exactly the right person at exactly the right moment. Information is the only currency in Providence that becomes more valuable when fewer people remember it.
It costs exposure. Every one of those choices is one somebody can be making about you, and the better you get the more worth having your file becomes.
Get caught and you are cleansed. Your key still works. Your job and rank remain. Your garden is still there and your kitchen is exactly as you decorated it. What is missing is harder to inventory: names, conversations, promises, favours, the reason you stopped trusting your supervisor.
You keep what you own. You lose what you knew.
Die instead and you come back as a new hire with one desperate advantage: your old house sits under a 48-hour quarantine while the crews prepare it for reassignment. Most people respect the quarantine. You do not have to. You break in, you find the hiding place, and you recognise the handwriting. It is yours. You do not remember writing it.
The careful climber fears dying. The blackmailer fears the cleanse. Everyone ends up insuring against the loss that would hurt them most — and that is the meta-game.
Not cozy then horror. Both at once, continuously, for the whole game.
Between the crimes you are choosing wallpaper, planting a garden you will not see mature, swapping furniture at the company store and going to the harvest supper. Those hours are not a palate cleanser and they are not ironic. They are the thing the horror is measured against, and they are why losing hurts.
Providence does not stop being beautiful because something terrible happens there. The people do not stop being kind because they are capable of terrible things. The Foundation does not stop saving lives because you finally learn what it costs.
Eventually you stop asking whether Providence will take care of you, and start asking what it believes you are.
In development, by a very small team. There is no release date and there will not be one until it is close enough to be true.
The Steam page is not up yet. When it is, this is where it will be — and wishlisting will be the single most useful thing anyone can do for a game this size.
There is no mailing list and no form here collecting anything in the meantime.