◂ STATIONIFY P100 RUNO 51 TEKSTI-TV 26.09.88 23:47:06

P666 HIISI · pirate page breaks in

Runo 51 A Cyberpunk Kalevala

Nuclear war. Nuclear winter. Finland sang itself a shield.

You're dead. The machines can't see you. Sing them open.

FINLAND 1988

The Kalevala, Finland's national epic, rebuilt as network tech: a story-driven cyberpunk RPG of stealth and song, in grim pixel art. Your skills, implants and choices shape who Lemmi becomes. You are a murdered lineman, raked back from the dead — and the network that runs the last country on earth can no longer see you.

  • Cyberpunk
  • RPG
  • Stealth
  • Hacking
  • Story Rich
  • Choices Matter
  • Alternate History
  • Mythology
  • Pixel Graphics
  • English & Finnish
Get notified at launch Read page 200
PC & Mac · Coming to Steam
Kallio · in-game, no HUD

Music: “Vielä täällä”, the Kallio theme, from the game.

Acts across Finland
5
Endings
6
First playthrough
7–9 h
To see everything
16–20 h
Languages, English & Finnish
2
Platforms
Windows · macOS

200 The world

The world ended in 1983. Finland sang a shield over itself.

On 26 September 1983, a Soviet early-warning satellite mistook sunlight on clouds for American missiles. In our world, a duty officer named Stanislav Petrov called it a false alarm. In this one, nobody did.

Finland, the most over-prepared nation on earth, had been getting ready for exactly that night. Hidden inside its brand-new NMT mobile-phone network was a secret digital network, years ahead of anything else in the world. In the fourteen minutes before impact, thousands of masts sang in unison and raised a shield over the country: the Lid. The world burned. Finland didn't.

Now it is 1988. Snow falls in July, the sky is an aurora-green dome, and the sun is only a projection on it. Every Finn carries a network chip implanted at birth, and the nation worships the network in the language of the Kalevala: masts are World Pillars, the core network is the Sampo, and hacking means singing a machine its origin-song.

You are Lemmi Saarelainen, a lineman-monk who keeps the masts singing. On a border mast you hear a song hidden in the signal, and you are murdered for it. Your mother, an illegal nano-healer, rakes you back from the dead. The network has deleted you — and someone is about to shrink the Lid and leave 800,000 people outside it.

300 Features

He carries no weapon. He sings.

  1. 301

    Unseen by the machines

    The network deleted you, so its cameras, scanners and locks can't see you. People still can. Every patrol route has a hiding place: wait, slip past, and walk where the network can't look.

  2. 302

    Hacking is a song

    Hacking is singing a machine its origin-song. Learn tunes from people, graffiti and pirate teletext, fit them to your kantele deck, and play them on the strings to open what the regime keeps shut.

  3. 303

    Sing them into the swamp

    Under the Lid, disputes are settled in verse, with kantele and voice — and the loser is sung into the swamp, just as Väinämöinen sang young Joukahainen down to his neck in the Kalevala's third runo.

  4. 304

    Six endings, and someone to rake you back

    How honest you are, who you save, who joins your crew and what you say when it counts decide which of six endings is offered — and whether anyone is left to rake you back out of the river of Tuonela.

  5. 305

    The last country on earth

    From the neon of Kallio to walled Turku, from the Åland Sea to the Arctic Circle border — a dead man's road across a Finland that survived under the Lid.

  6. 306

    Less man, more machine

    A character sheet tracks Lemmi's skills — SANA for words, KORVA for the ear and more — and the dialogue checks them. Healers fit implants into his dead body, each one pulling him further from man toward machine, and his kantele deck takes tuners in six sockets: the songs fitted to them bend the world around you — locks, lamps, machines.

  7. 307

    Swim the data sea

    In Ahtola, the network's data sea, you swim as a pike, because the network can't draw a dead man. The shallows are the past and the deep is the future, and when Aino speaks she turns from a salmon into a giant face of light.

  8. 308

    The Sampo is a server

    Every piece of Kalevala lore maps onto a piece of network tech, and the myth's monsters are machines: Iron Vipunen, the buried giant, is a cyborg with birches growing from his shoulders, and Louhi's eagle is built from a ship. Real history up to 26 September 1983, then a bent reality: sauna, teletext, bark bread and a tango in a minor key.

400 Travel

Ice roads under the Lid.

From the second act on, Nikolai's hovercraft takes you across the ice roads between Helsinki, Tampere, walled Turku, Mariehamn on the Seam and places further out. Open the map at a dock and travel back to any place that's still open — for a job you skipped, someone you never spoke to, a tune you haven't learned.

Off the main road

  • Side jobs in every hub
  • Kantele songs hidden in people, graffiti and pirate teletext
  • An arcade, disguises and a wardrobe
  • Prequels and memories, playable from Chapters
The travel map, Teksti-TV page 470 Ice Roads: Finland under the Lid, the ice routes between towns, Helsinki selected, one hour away
Page 470, Ice Roads: the hovercraft's routes under the Lid.
Nikolai's hovercraft moored at a dock in Tampere at night, under the aurora
Nikolai's hovercraft at the dock in Tampere.

500 Screens

Under the Lid.

The King's Hall in walled Turku: knights, a fool and the court before the King's throne, under propaganda tapestries
The last king in the world holds court in walled Turku.
Ahtola, the data sea: Lemmi swims as a pike past a ring of the network, with Turso's children closing in
Ahtola: the network's deep water. The pike is you.
The character sheet: the Book of Life marks Lemmi DELETED, and implant slots are wired to his body
The Book of Life: deleted. Implants wired into a dead man.
Eira at night: a Sun Guard's lantern swings toward the doorway where Lemmi hides
Sunny Eira: behind the walls there is warmth, real food and strawberries in November.
Lemmi facing Joukahainen on the Kalmankallio stage, with the crowd and the animated SAMPO.EXE projection behind them
Joukahainen's song battle at Kalmankallio, beneath the SAMPO.EXE demo.
The Church's Reef: coral grown from archive tape reels, and the pike swimming past
The Church's Reef: archive coral grown from tape reels.
The masters' club at the top of the Needle in Tampere: a bar against tall windows, the night city and the aurora behind
Tampere from the top of the Needle.
Four linemen on the bench in the lodge sauna as the steam rises off the stove
The Order's lodge, December 1985. Saturday löyly.

Sing the street dark

Vaasankatu at night before the lamp tune: lit windows, a lit CHIP CHECK sign, Lemmi in a doorway The same street after the lamp tune: the electric light has died, only a burning barrel still glows
One song, and the street's electric light dies. The fire keeps burning.

666 Launch list

The Kalevala has fifty songs. The fifty-first is yours to sing.

Be there when the Lid opens.

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700 Privacy

The game sends nothing.

Runo 51 has no analytics, no ads and no tracking of its own. Your saves live on your computer. Steam features such as achievements and cloud saves are handled by Valve, under Steam's privacy policy.

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  • No ads
  • No tracking
  • No account of ours
  • Saves on your computer
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P100 SAMPO · Public information