Some games defy explanation. Mutant Epoch is one of them. The game is essentially the work of a single creator, encompassing both the art, which helps define the setting. The game is ugly, unhinged, insane, freakish, crazy, and a work of art in gaming.
At times, I wonder, what did I just read? And then the brilliance of that pure honesty and "just say it" moment hits me. The game feels like a psychedelic drug trip mixed with a classic 80s or 90s Heavy Metal magazine subscription. This is not a game for everyone, as it tackles mature themes. If you come in expecting to have your feelings protected and coddled by cute, cozy game animals or pastel fantasy races, just walk away.
This is the roleplaying equivalent of starting out sleeping under a bridge and becoming a post-apocalyptic murder hobo, lord of battle, and spiked baseball bat-wielding cyborg auto-battle gladiator.
In a way, this game is more accurate to modern, on-the-street 2025 city life than today's pandering role-playing games, which often simulate present-day fantasy worlds, usually mirroring the suburban enclaves of the rich in which the games are played. Mutant Epoch is "living in the combat zone" if the combat zone encompasses the entire world. Every tactic of surviving on the mean streets of 2025 is a valid play style here. The local warlord's enforcers may show up in riot gear with gas and batons, just to beat the stuffing out of the discontented, including your characters, for their own amusement.
Does it matter that you are "the rules-anointed heroes" and "adventurers so always right?"
No, you are still getting the tar beaten out of you.
This isn't 5E.
People despise honesty and tend to gravitate towards groups that lie to them the most. We live in an era where power is defined by how hard you fight to make outright lies ...truths. The rich want to keep pretending they are influencers and cosplaying fakeness. Wall Street needs to keep selling you the lies of nostalgia and fantasy to keep the opiate entertainment flowing, lest you realize what is really going on.
And the world of Mutant Epoch sucks. It is filthy, random, broken, filled with hate, do anything to survive, and violent. This isn't some author's "perfect world" written into the adventure to reinforce a personal belief. Everything can kill you. Civilization...isn't.
I grew up in rural Appalachia, a place so impoverished that we created our own games out of cardboard boxes that would have otherwise been sent to recycling, drawing on them with ink markers. We made our own hand-drawn maps using pencils and colored pencils. We ate government food, which consisted of giant blocks of cheese and butter, bread purchased at the thrift store, and had very few healthy options provided by that system.
Violence, hooliganism, crime, and even the threat of nuclear apocalypse were everyday things.
We rented VHS tapes. We read paperbacks and comic books. We got our TV over the air. We did not have cable, streaming, or the Internet. We watched shows as they were broadcast, and there was no option to "see them later." We listened to the radio, waiting for our favorite songs to come on.
Your education was the only thing they could not take from you.
Politics and online debates over beliefs, hot-button topics, and lies were never a thing. The government never helped, was rarely present, and played a minimal role in our lives.
We were poor.
We never mattered to anyone.
If you could find any advantage out of your 'lousy start in life,' you took it. I don't care what it was - your smarts, a trade skill, or your looks - if you had something, you leaned on it hard to escape. If you didn't, then you still hustled and made the most of what you had. You could never truly escape, but the battle became between how you helped yourself versus how you helped others. And there were times when nothing you could do would make it better, so you fought hard to minimize the loss.
I get where this game is coming from.
This isn't OSR, this is a new game. The rules are elementary at their core, just a straightforward percentile system with a resistance chart, but they are surrounded by charts so deep that it is like sorting through a city landfill. And it is not an unpleasant task to sort through them, every one of them is another character creation option for truly unique individual characters.
The character creation process has a vast gulf between the most powerful and least potent characters. You may start out as a special forces combat cyborg or as a hairdresser android. You could start out as a mutant behemoth gladiator or a lowly mutant servant farmer with a passive sensory power.
The definition of who you are should not start with power; it should be your story and what you do with what you have. There is an "anti-5E" sort of design ethos at play here, where no two characters will ever start off being equally balanced and powerful. However, if you can't make the best of a strange set of skills, make lemonade out of lemons, you are not an imaginative and genuinely great role player.
That hairdresser android? Give me that character and watch me become the hairdresser of a giant Mad Max-style highway gang, and convince them that they can't indeed be awesome without 80s hairband levels of mullets, hairspray, coloring, and volumizer. I now have a whole highway gang at my disposal. If I tell them an ancient installation has a ten-year stockpile of mousse and hair gel for our greasers, you can be sure we are heading in there to grab everything we can. Who was talking about character power again?
The game is a "direct-to-video" simulation of 1980s and 90s post-apocalyptic movies, comics, graphic novels, fiction, and popular culture. The game is raw, uncut, and unhinged, so far removed from PC publishing culture that it shines as a masterpiece of gaming and a reflection of today's zeitgeist in the fight to survive another day.