Pomegranate Pill (Play HERE)

Pomegranate Pill is a Twine game. Inspired by the tale of Hades and Persephone, the game adapts the story into a cyberpunk space universe where the husk of our Earth is now the equivalent of the Underworld. The player navigates the story as Persephone, who has crashed into the Deadlands after her spacecraft CHARON accidentally malfunctions.

I wanted to keep the integrity of the mythology intact while reflavoring aspects of the tale. A lot of the worldbuilding came naturally once the setting was decided to be a postmodern, gritty cyberpunk. The juxtaposition of life and death between Hades and Persephone was translated into the conflict of transhumanism (cybernetics) and bioconservatism (preserving the ‘natural’ state of humans as intended). Demeter would be the leader of the bioconservatism movement, which automatically created a rift between her and Hades. The separation of the Underworld and the living world turned into planets – the Underworld was called “The Deadlands” and was what would be our current Earth, depleted of its resources and turned into a husk in the future. Because Hades is also technically the god of riches, I wanted some sort of valuable resource on the planet that had some sort of gritty side effect – thus, psychedelic crystals were born.

There are other mythologies briefly mentioned, because death (and therefore, Hades by extension as the ‘ruler’ of the underworld)  is present in all of them: Theseus and the labyrinth, Thanatos, even my somewhat scrapped Zeus and Kronos story were included. The ‘new world’ – a planet called Neo – humanity moved to post-apocalypse on planet Earth was meant to clearly juxtapose the Deadlands. Demeter’s fear of transhumanism is because she does not want history to repeat itself and for planet Neo to destroy itself.

The text is formatted to separate the things that happen in present, physical space versus things that happen on the messaging system. This is expressed through font and color – monospace font for messages and console logs, Garamond for the ‘present and physical’. Because I was enthusiastic about the worldbuilding, I thought to allow the player to explore without fear of making the ‘wrong choice’ – choices would affect how much information they got about the world and characters, and some choices would allow them to build Persephone’s personality – but none clearly altered the main conflict and characters. You can make Persephone continue to follow Demeter by the end of the story, or you can take some sense of independence and opposition to Demeter after meeting Hades.