All Will Rise: Ordinary Brown People Taking Extraordinary Climate Action
- Nivedita Bansal
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
All Will Rise is an indie role playing game about eco-anxiety and planetry boundaries set in Kerala-punk world.
You’re a lawyer in Muziris, Kerala, in a magical world that could be yours. Muziris is a vibrant city, under pressure from corporate and political interests, with a local river giving life to the city and community. The river is polluted by a huge oil spill which catches fire. Toxic smoke engulfs Muziris, and the pollution devastates the community.
The river is a god, and they killed her. So logically, you take billionaires to court for poisoning the river.
All Will Rise is a role-playing game (RPG) that lets you sue polluters for the climate crisis. You come together with the city's discordant factions to rally them (or rile them up) towards your cause. The game presents godmen and ecoterrorists, capitalist overlords and construction workers, and even conspiracy theorists and hacker seeresses all interacting for a shared cause. You play with unlockable cards earned by following leads and making choices, pursue a corrupt billionaire in court, and hold him responsible for killing the river.
Produced by indie game studio Speculative Agency, the game taps into the deep well of eco-anxiety and overwhelm that people feel in the face of the climate crisis. The narrative courtroom deck-builder approach is targeted at ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The game touches upon sustainability issues like river ecosystems, pollution, fossil fuels, natural resource exploitation, nature conservation, and planetary boundaries, all nested within broader narratives of gender, caste, religion, and institutional and corporate corruption.
Story and world building
Playexrs are immersed into lore that transforms core attitudes towards the environment and humankind. The world heavily explores the human/nature interface in a manner that does justice to culturally rooted practices of spiritual connections to nature. Yet, AWR maintains a playful, silly tone throughout the game, especially while dealing with serious topics like ecocide and human rights. Meghna Jayanth, creative head at Speculative Agency, shares, “[All Will Rise] is not didactic in nature about its takeaway message, but we want to capture the nuances of climate action for the player”. AWR also delicately navigates perspectives about India to foreign audiences, ensuring that the game and its players do not perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Kerala and India.
The characters are stylized but realistic enough to be real people we all know - that uncle next door, that weird girl you went to school with, the neighbourhood baba/godman, and more. Making the characters familiar to the players makes the game all the more relatable and fun. The character outfits draw inspiration from local flora and fauna, with robes, leather punk jackets, and hairstyles that scream counter-culture. An important aspect in character design is the fidelity to natural skin tones, completely unlike the majority of media about Indian contexts that end up erasing darker skin tones and local facial features for Western aesthetics. Yuvraj Jha, game designer at Speculative Agency, takes the characters a step further by giving each character its own distinct colour palette, making each character a visual treat and a universe of their own.
The game is set in a surreal Kerala-punk world that looks realistic enough to capture the horrific visuals of the climate crisis. Jha describes the All Will Rise world as ‘magical realism’ fueled by Indo-futuristic visuals, heavily inspired by species native to the Kerala region. They used textures and colours witnessed in India that are unique to local realities. The music is inspired by real sounds in nature and instruments local to Kerala. The score contains beats with Kombu (trumpet-like instrument), Chenda (drum) from Kerala, blended with Western instruments for a holistic piece that feels Indian yet futuristic. The game also features ambient noises like an auto horn and local birdsong to make the game feel all the more realistic and immersive into Indian cities. The strong coherence with writing and audiovisuals promises a memorable gameplay.
Perspective shifts
The game is set in Southern India in a fictional city, full of wetlands and tropical species. Setting the game in a ‘developing’ country helps dispel the myth that climate action can only happen in ‘developed’ Global North countries. The game challenges liberal values, especially green liberalism, because personal freedom and liberty is misused when people deliberately poison commons like rivers and soil for their selfish gain. They create a shift from egoism—constantly thinking about personal gain—towards moral responsibility for other humans, animals, plants, and non-human entities like water or wind. In an ethical climate that focuses on harm reduction or closing the loop for sustainability, AWR delves headstrong into climate justice and making society better and going the extra mile.
Furthermore, AWR goes beyond Western ideas of rivers being inanimate objects, and explores the spiritual connection of the community with a river as a living body. Native communities across the world share a deep spiritual connection to their natural environment, and AWR captures these everyday realities of Indians in a matter-of-fact manner. ‘Killing a river’ is in line with theories like rights of nature, that argue that a river is a living being with a right to live, like a human would. Inspired by landmark judgements about Rights of Nature in New Zealand and Tamil Nadu, India, AWR takes the courtroom route to assert the Rights of Nature to exist and entitlement to a healthy environment.
Transformative Capabilities of All Will Rise
Many types of art and media have been used to inspire behaviour change, but gaming stands out. Gaming has the potential of immersive storytelling as well as active input from the player. ‘Climate games’ can be considered a colloquial expression for they really are - simulations. These games help players experientially understand the complexity and nuances of climate action in a safe and low-stakes environment. Arguably, climate games are doing what thousands of scientific papers and reports cannot - make climate knowledge palatable, and inspire action. However, according to a study by Moosdorff & Vervoort (2026) that investigated 287 climate games, a majority of climate games tend to focus on awareness building on climate change. They rarely inspire deep reflection on values or care around climate change, as moral and emotional motivation tends to be the main driver for climate action.
Reflecting on these limitations of climate gaming, All Will Rise attempts to redefine the transformative scope of climate games. They help expand the moral circle of the users to go beyond caring for the self, to community, to flora and fauna, to ecosystems, and eventually to Gaia as a whole. Redefined moral boundaries set the foundation to climate action, making it more inclusive and equitable, rather than reinforcing outdated perspectives of exploitation of nature and humans alike. AWR helps players explore the realm of possibility when it comes to climate action by breaking down complex theories and messy stakeholder management into a coherent story, filling the space between climate science and public participation.
Better human systems for a better world
Perhaps the most interesting thing about All Will Rise is that it challenges the ideas of technofix - that some technology will come in and save us, even if it doesn’t exist yet. The idea of suing a billionaire or your own government is a radical act that seeks to improve the quality, justice, accountability and efficiency of human systems, instead of simply rejecting them for deep-rooted corruption and brokenness. The solution to malfunctioning human systems is better human systems, not technology, so let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
So, with technofix out of the picture - how does an ordinary citizen do extraordinary things? For starters, it is every citizen’s democratic right to seek justice from the judicial system. The game is about a lawyer navigating taking billionaires to court for polluting and ‘killing’ a river, but the nuance here is that communities need to be mobilized too. The strategy aspects of the game helps players simulate the power dynamics in communities that can often block or misalign well meaning climate action. Bringing together different factions of the city that don’t often see eye to eye is crucial in real-world changemaking as well.
“Talking to people in All Will Rise is based on the idea that you often partner with another person when you’re having a conversation,” Speculative Agency’s co-founder and producer Niels Monshouwer says. “In Dutch we use the word ‘gesprekspartner’, conversational partner, for the person you’re talking to, and conveying that feeling of partnering with someone was important to us.” Having conversations about climate change can be challenging, especially if you are talking to a climate denier - or worse, an active polluter. At Talk Dharti To Me’s core climate philosophy, we also believe in the power of words delivering change through dialogue and reading - because when you change someone’s perspective or persuade them, they become allies too. Players can choose different strategies like virtue signaling or collective gain to convince the stakeholders to mobilize for justice.
Support All Will Rise
Speculative Agency takes AWR’s gameplay accessibility very seriously. The game demo is available on consoles (Playstation and Nintendo switch - with a boycott of XBOX due to Microsoft’s involvement in war and genocide), gaming computers, standard desktops and laptops, mobiles and tablets, and Nintendo switch. And while the initial gameplay is set in Kerala, India, the developers hope to create more stories in Lagos, the Netherlands, and Puerto Rico to inspire and relate to players across the world. Players don’t need prior knowledge of climate change to play AWR. For further accessibility, the game offers colour blindness and visual impairment support with alternate palettes and adjustable text sizes. The game is available only in English, but developers are exploring the possibilities of more languages in the future.
You can support All Will Rise in the following ways:
Donate to their fundraiser to support their game development.
Play the demo, leave a review, and wishlist the game on Steam
Spread the word with family and friends
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