The Chest

The Chest is a game about a medieval village that lives inside a chest on your desk

Lift the lid and you’re looking down at fields, a dozen roofs, a well and a road into the forest. About thirty people live down there. They plough, get married, fall ill, argue about where one field ends and the next begins, and pray in the evenings. None of it needs you. You can just watch them, the way you’d watch an ant farm.

Or you can step in. You can talk to the villagers through your microphone and they’ll answer you out loud. You can drop things from your desk into the chest: bread, salt, a knife, a book. To them it’s a miracle from the sky, and every miracle changes something. Someone keeps the gift, someone holds a grudge, someone starts waiting for the next one.

They remember all of it. Every villager has their own memory of what happened to them, who helped, who cheated them and what they make of you. Children grow up on their parents’ stories, so a couple of generations later your miracle has become a legend, and not always an accurate one.

You can’t lose. The village might get rich, starve through a bad winter or stop believing in you, and the game just carries on.

Where the idea came from

A while ago I came across a clip from a Chinese web drama, The Ming Dynasty in a Box. An ordinary office worker gets a big box for his birthday and finds a living village inside, in the middle of a drought, with bandits and a famine. He drops in half an egg, it feeds the whole village for three days, and the villagers decide he’s a god.

I wanted that box. I went looking for a game like it and couldn’t find one. There are the old god games like Black & White, there are sandboxes, and there are a couple of experiments with AI characters. But there’s no game where a small village looks real, remembers you, talks to you, and where every gift has consequences. So I’m making one.

The villagers

There are no extras in this village. Everyone has a name, an age, a family, a trade and a temper: one is greedy, one is devout, one loses it at the slightest thing. Point at anyone in the chest at the top of the page and you’ll see what’s on their mind.

When you talk to someone, a language model writes their reply. All it knows about that person is what’s in their memory: a few text files about who they are, what’s happened to them and how they feel about their neighbours and about you. Little things get forgotten over time, while the things that matter stay with them for years.

Sixty years later

In our test village, old Michael froze to death in the winter of year 14 after his family ran out of firewood. That part really came out of the simulation. Here’s how people might tell the story later on:

Agnes, his neighbouryear 14
“Michael froze in his own house. We had wood. Nobody thought to bring him any.”
Ulrich, her sonthirty years later
“Mother said old Michael was too proud to ask for firewood.”
Ulrich’s daughtersixty years later
“Michael the Elder wouldn’t bow to God, so God put out his fire.”

The retellings show where I’m taking the memory system. It’s still being built.

Things from our world

The desk next to the chest has ordinary things on it. Drop any of them in and it lands in the village as big as a house. You can drop in as much as you like, but it all has consequences. Feed the village every day and people stop working and start waiting. Let it get rich and the tax collectors and bandits will hear about it.

The demo will have five things:

Bread
Gone in a day. If bread keeps falling, gratitude turns into waiting pretty quickly.
Bottle of water
They’ll drink the water straight away and keep the bottle. Nobody here has ever seen anything that clear, so expect an argument over who gets it.
Salt
Whoever salts their meat gets through the winter more easily, and the neighbours notice.
Knife
One knife for the whole village. The strongest man will probably take it, and everyone else will start wanting steel.
Book
Nobody can read, so everyone decides for themselves what it says. That’s how sects get started.

Talking to them

You talk to the villagers through your microphone. Whoever is near the spot you’re looking at will hear you. You can whisper to one person or speak from the sky to the whole village, and they answer in their own voices. Language isn’t a problem: the hero wears AR glasses that translate both ways. English, Russian and Chinese at launch.

You can also keep quiet and listen. Bring the camera down to the people by the well and you’ll hear what the village says about you when it thinks you can’t hear.

How to tell what they think of you

There are no faith bars or percentages. You find out where you stand by listening to their prayers. First they thank you, then they wait for you, then they make demands. Help some households and ignore others and the village splits. The prayers change roughly like this:

Gratitude
“Thank you for the bread. We did nothing to deserve it.”
Waiting
“Last time the bread came on the third day. This is the fourth.”
Demands
“We kept the feast. Where is our share?”
Bargaining
“Heal Agatha’s boy, and the first sheaf is yours.”
Split
“You feed Jakob’s household. You never hear ours.”
Heresy
“The hand in the sky is no god of ours.”
Doubt
“Bread doesn’t fall from heaven. Somebody put it there.”

No pause button

While the game is running, time keeps passing in the chest. You can speed it up, but you can’t stop it. Drop in a pile of gifts, leave the game on and go to bed, and in the morning your glasses will tell you what happened overnight. When you close the game, the world freezes and waits for you.

What already works

Everything in the chest at the top of the page is drawn by your browser. There are no real graphics yet; I’ll be making those in Unity. What already works is the part the whole game rests on: the village simulation. It works out the weather and the harvest and decides who marries whom, who inherits what and who dies. It doesn’t need graphics and can run hundreds of years ahead from the command line.

The AI isn’t allowed anywhere near the simulation. It can’t invent a death or a sack of grain; its job is to give the villagers a voice. That’s why the same starting seed always produces the same history, so I can test it and tune it.

I ran ten villages for a hundred years each, and the numbers came out close to real history: life expectancy at birth of about 27, roughly three babies in ten dying before their first birthday, and a hungry year every five or six years.

Below is a page from the chronicle of the test village, the same one that’s in the chest above. The simulation wrote it and I haven’t touched the text.

Year 14

Autumn. The harvest was good.

Winter. Death took Michael, aged 67, of cold. The household of Michael stood empty; the family of Jakob took what was left. After Michael, Anselm (husband of Sibylla) became the elder. Walter (husband of Elisabeth) died aged 43, of a chest sickness. After Walter, the widow Elisabeth became head of the household. The family of Michael went cold without firewood.

Births 2, deaths 2, people 33.

Seed 3, year 14. Michael is the old man you can find in the chest at the top of the page.

What you need to run it

You buy the game once. If your graphics card can handle it, the AI runs on your own computer, offline, and there’s nothing more to pay.

16 GB of video memory: Everything runs locally: the language model, speech recognition and the villagers’ voices.
12 GB: Still local, with a simpler model and plainer voices.
Less, a Mac or a Steam Deck: Through the cloud, with a Chest Cloud subscription. It only pays for the computing and gives you nothing extra in the game.

For now these are targets. Fitting the AI and a good-looking 3D village onto a single 16 GB card is the first thing I have to test.

Where things stand

I’m making the game on my own, with AI agents helping me write the code. I’m not giving dates: until the key things are measured, any date would be made up. This is where things are as of 14 September 2026.

In progress, 26 of 42 tasks done
Village simulation
Seasons, harvests, families, inheritance, the elder and the council, faith, merchants, tax collectors and bandits. It runs, and I read its chronicles year by year.
Starting soon
Graphics card test
Speech recognition, a language model, voice synthesis and a heavy 3D scene all running on one 16 GB card, with a villager starting to answer in about a second.
Designed
Villager memory
The memory file format, forgetting, and passing memories on to children.
After that
First playable scene
The village in 3D, the hand, the desk with five things on it, talking by voice and the prologue in the AR glasses.
The goal
Demo
An hour of play for the first testers, then Steam.