Four Horsemen
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
EMIGRATE TO WESTERN EUROPE.
MAKE CORNFLAKE NACHOS.
CONFRONT THE GHOSTS OF A DEAD INTERNET.
PRETEND YOU DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH.
BUILD A BLENDER OUT OF PLASTIC SPOONS.
GET ARRESTED FOR APOLOGIZING TO A COP INFORMALLY.
KISS YOUR CRUSH.
START AN ARMED INSURRECTION.
WATCH ANIME.
DIE FIGHTING FOR YOUR RIGHTS IN A BLAZE OF GLORY.
START OVER IN NORTH AFRICA.
WATCH LESS ANIME THIS TIME.
Four Horsemen is a visual novel / SLG about homelands and the immigrant experience. Play as a group of four contemporary immigrant teenagers squatting in a World War II era machine gun bunker, trying to find a place for themselves in a pre-apocalyptic, present-dystopian country that has no place for them. Will you go native, turning against your own people to bury the past your parents fled to escape? Will you cling to your parents' identity at any cost, at the price of being a permanent stranger in your home country? Or will you strike out on your own, turning against both your homelands to shape a destiny for yourself? Love is all you need...and also improvised firearms.
Drawing from the developers' own lived experiences, interviews with current and former immigrant teens from around the world, and a year of painstaking anthropological research, featuring4 different main storylines,9 different endings, 12 different playable homelands(all of which play differently), and a multitude of agonizing, important decisions, Four Horsemen is the most heartwarmingly familiar, brutally honest video game about the immigrant experience ever created. One playthrough can be finished in a matter of hours, but you'll want to revisit it again and again to see all of the many stories the game has to tell...and to pursue that elusive dream of a land you can call your own.
Exciting Bullet Points!!
- YOUR DECISIONS MATTER. Hard choices you make at the beginning come back to haunt you at the end. Characters turn out to be heroic or villainous depending on how you treat them--and they don't always reward you for treating them well.
- NO TWO COUNTRIES PLAY ALIKE. Each homeland has its own unique vocabulary, set of cultural values, prejudices, and history. Choices that are a good idea in one country turn out to be a reaaaaally bad idea in another. Like a real immigrant, you'll have to read your new culture and learn to adapt.
- NOT JUST BLACK AND WHITE. No faction reputation system! No alignment meter! Four Horsemen offers realistic, genuinely difficult moral choices, and to some questions there are no right answers--only different consequences.
- DELIGHTFUL CRAFTING SYSTEM. Make that cold, austere war bunker feel like home--dive into dumpsters scrounging for parts, or buy them with your earnings from your terrible day job, and make reasonable DIY facsimiles of things you can't afford! Characters interact with things you build. Make a disco ball and they'll throw a dance party, patch up that hole in the roof and they'll enjoy a quiet moment together on a rainy day. But beware--the system is not exactly fair to immigrants...
- TRIUMPH OVER HATE. A bigot pulls a knife on you--what do you do? Do you try to de-escalate the situation with words...or respond by drawing your own blade? Our combat system replicates the anxiety and tension of real violence, not a power fantasy.
- THE MOST ADVANCED PROFANITY SYSTEM IN A VIDEO GAME, EVER. Audited by real current and former teenaged native speakers! Learn how to cast aspersions on a person's ancestry in 10 different real-world languages!
| Status | Released |
| Platforms | Windows,macOS,Linux |
| Release date | Apr 15, 2017 |
| Rating | Rated 4.2 out of 5 stars (91 total ratings) |
| Author | Nuclear Fishin' Software |
| Genre | Visual Novel |
| Made with | Ren'Py,IndieCade |
| Tags | Alternate History,Colorful,Coming Of Age,Crafting,Life Simulation,Meaningful Choices,Multiple Endings,Ren'Py,Story Rich |
| Average session | A few hours |
| Languages | English |
| Inputs | Keyboard,Mouse |
| Accessibility | Subtitles |
| Links | Steam,Homepage,Twitter/X,Kickstarter,Press Kit |
| Mentions | Announcing the itch.io Valentine's Day S... |
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $15 USD. Your purchase comes with a Steam key. You will get access to the following files:
Development log
Comments
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Good game!, one question though, which country is each country supposed to represent? i have some guesses, but i would like to know the truth.
Actually, a few months later, i think it's not supposed to represent specific countries, but cultures, like there are jews and muslims and germans and americans which do and have conflicts between each other, and they aren't based around the conflicts between two countries, but just racism in general.
This game is pretty great! The dialogue, the story, it had me hooked from when I started playing to when I finished all the main character routes.
However: I can't seem to get the true ending! I built all the instruments in my latest save file (even checked that they were all there in our inventory) but I simply don't understand how to see the true ending and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Does anybody have any hints for this?
I love this game! Everyone's been praising its insightful narratives and its masterful critique of xenophobia, racism, gender, and poverty, and I completely agree. Its combat system, rather than rewarding violence, forces you to compromise your pride and anger in order to diffuse tense situations, even while pressuring you to break under the strain. Word of advice, though: DON'T DO IT! I really loved the characterization of each route, and the subtle messages they conveyed.
I do have one nitpick though, which is that this game could use a walkthrough or at least a list of endings! I've broken all four seals, and I've crafted all the instruments, but I don't know how to get the true ending? Or if there even is one? Please, I'm begging you, someone help me.
Also, while I love the mishmash of cultures each country characterizes, I'd be interested to know which real-world cultures they're meant to correspond to. I'd really like to know if there's a Korean one!
For future players, I recommend you play the routes in order: pink, purple, blue, and then green. For blue, try not to craft weapons until you've gotten the SPOILERpolice raidSPOILER done with in the green route, so you don't accidentally get locked out of it. Another note is, the pink/purple and blue/green routes are each tied together, so you have to progress down the corresponding route a bit in order to unlock options for the other, in case you get stuck. If you're like me and you like getting the good endings first, for the green route make sure you max out public approval.
All in all, I totally recommend this game!
I really like this game, and this unique point of view and aesthetics. (and it's more topical every day)
I wanted to get the true ending, and i think i got all the ending for the other characters (all seals on the wall are cancelled).
I hoped that this last update would unlock it, via the plowshare, but it seems it wasn't it.
Anyone can share some hints? ^^;
I'm on my fourth playthrough and I just picked Angleterre out of curiosity. And then I saw the "we are going to take the Cornish pasty right out of your mouth" line in Martha's shop. You did NOT just imply Cornwall (or, as we say in Cornish, Kernow) is England in this otherwise tactful game about oppressed minorities.
Every other time I've seen this line, it's something seemingly appropriate like blood sausage for the Aurics. Cornish pasties for the English? Cornish pasties are, wait for it, Cornish! Cornwall is not England! I'm a Cornish immigrant myself, playing a game supposedly about the immigrant experience, and you are saying my culture is English. Which the English, who are the Aurics to our Wanderers, say, misappropriate for their own as they oppress my country and its people. I'm so disappointed.
Nyns yw Kernow Pow Sows. Cornwall is not England.
We offer our sincere apologies for the error. This was an oversight in our choice of research sources--we should have consulted people closer to your homeland, and fewer generations removed.
Development on this game ceased years ago, but this is a serious enough mistake that it is worth temporarily resuming development to address. We will release a patch to resolve this and some smaller cultural issues in the coming weeks.
Don't want to start anything with swordblade but they are completely wrong here. I'm Cornish, my dad is Cornish, my grandparents are Cornish and this goes back generations. I have lived in Cornwall my entire life and continue to do so.
Because of this, I feel I can give you some input. Swordblade is wrong, Cornwall is absolutely in England. It is a county in England and while could be considered separate, it is in no way separated from England. It has been a part of England since at least before 1066, and possibly earlier.
Some Cornish people believe that Cornwall should be its own place but for the time being, it is England. Also, I thought the line about Cornish pasties was pretty funny. Please don't listen to swordblade or feel bad for this. Even if you have patched the game already. In future, I would be more than happy to help with anything Cornish related should you need it as I have first-hand knowledge as well as sources of first-hand knowledge from my family and have done a lot of research into this.
Hello, I bought this game in a bundle that happened recently, and I do enjoy the storyline and characters themselves. I do have multiple things to note.
1. I have no clue how to get the ending for the purple character (famine?), the heir's throne ending, or the true ending. I've tried multiple times with the scarce amount of info lying around about this game, but I still can't achieve it. I wish there was a guide for this game around, but honestly, due to the sheer amount of endings this game has, at the very least it needs anENDING LIST. So you can see what endings you have achieved, and potentially get small hints for the ones you haven't.
2. The autosave feature, whilst showing realism by saying you can't go back on your choices, is extremelyannoying. Especially if you're on a branching path that has two different endings you want to see BOTH of, so you have to replay the entire game up to that point, just to potentially see a bad ending.
3. I wanted to see the outcome of the violent options, so I attempted them. But no matter what, they'd never work? I'd never had the option to fight a character first, even during options where the game is openly letting me get the first blow. I think it might be a issue with the enter/backspace keys?
I do enjoy this game, but in it's current state, it's just extremely hard to finish. Is there any hints at the very least about the endings I'm missing?
So. I got this in the Racial Justice bundle and I really enjoyed it. Like everyone else, I'm wondering how to do the Hangman's throne ending. However.
On one of the routes I played as having all the main characters be Aurin. That was fine, at first. Then I started playing through Athena/Pestilence?'s route.
I don't know how to tell you this but it is .... extremely inappropriate, I think, to have the suffering of refugees who are fleeing persecution and facing discrimination be equated to a situation where you have the daughter of a Nazi killer (who.... is it Pestilence??? the name that was given to her in my game was Athena. Anyways, her father is pretty clearly shown to be a Nazi) trying to say she's oppressed. Like. It's not comparable. It's really not. And I absolutely cannot sympathize with her in that instance.
And it's pretty ahistorical, too. Like. A lot of Nazis got away with what they did. There are still Nazis- original ones, who participated in the genocide- hiding and not facing punishment. They're living normal lives. They got away with it.
I just dont think it's possible to equate the two things. It makes a lot more sense when you're playing as Marianne Empire refugees, or Cristelenos, but not when you play as Angleterre refugees, or Aurin ones either. Because... reverse racism isn't real.
I like this game. But I don't think I'll ever be able to play the Aurin route- or the Angleterre one, for that matter- again.
Hi Alarys,
I'm glad you've been enjoying the game! I understand your feelings about that route in Aurentin and I appreciate your perspective. I anticipated this might be controversial, and I don't expect to convince you, but I feel like I should at least explain what my thinking was for writing it that way.
(Spoilers ahead.)
One of the many historical inspirations for that route, and for the design of the Auric setting in general, was the fate of the children of Nazis whose parents were killed in WWII, many of who emigrated to countries in South America, changed their names, and disappeared into the local population. As I myself am a descendant of specific people who participated in crimes against humanity--which, without getting into detail, were part of a terrible historical moment absolutely comparable in scale and inhumanity to the Holocaust--the stories I found of assimilated immigrants rediscovering their lost heritage and discovering that their parents and ancestors had committed terrible atrocities in their homeland resonated with me. Revelations like this dramatically affect how people born within a diaspora internalize their treatment by local people in a new country, and how their heritage fits into their personal identity. Such context can change the theme of a person's struggle as an immigrant, and indeed the theme of their entire life, from self-determination to transgenerational atonement.
For this conflict to be reflected meaningfully in the game I needed to give Athena (and the player) options in how to process this information into her identity and her struggle against her own oppression, which accurately reflect both historical examples and my own lived experience. That meant leaving in the choice for Athena to become a Nazi herself...if only so it would actually mean something, with real stakes, if she refused it.
The Auric Riders are not Nazis, they are the children of Nazis. The communities that the historical children of Nazis emigrated to often didn't make that distinction, and the result was sometimes adults who became fierce opponents of what their parents stood for, and sometimes it was more Nazis. I am sorry for putting you in the uncomfortable position of empathizing with them, even though making people uncomfortable is exactly what this game is intended to do.
In the game's launch marketing I emphasized that this game would not just be a feel-good story about heroic immigrants rising up against the oppression of local bigots, because sometimes the context behind true immigrant stories is much more complicated than the origin myths that second-generation immigrants are told. That marketing never reached customers who bought the game through the bundle, and I apologize that this wasn't communicated well on the itch.io store page.
-K
I know this is from a long time ago, but as a 2nd gen kid of Austrian descent, I appreciated the Auric route a lot! Kids who moved elsewhere with German/Austrian parents got kicked around a lot, even if they were little kids during the war. It does mess you up, and absolutely sometimes that discrimination made more Nazis. Nice to see an exploration of this complicated moment in history - yes awful things happened, but those kids weren't part of it, and they didn't deserve to pay for what their parents did.
Bus stop fight was confusing. I didn't know which key to press to back off and got punched. And Sharon fight just didn't work here. I could switch which character I wanted to use but I couldn't pick. I tried every key and I couldn't pick a character so my game "ended" there because I couldn't progress with the fight.
By the way, my ctrl keys and my big enter key are broken. I only use the calculator enter key. So maybe it was one of those keys?
This game is so good. I want to see the rest of it.
Hey, so this game failed to install on Linux. I used the itch desktop app to install it, it downloaded a .tar.bz2 archive but did not extract it. So in my game install folder I just have an archive and nothing else. Could you please either:
- Pick a different format for the archive that’s more commonly used (e.g. .tar.gz)
- Ask the itch app developers to sort this out(?)
Hello.
I really like your game so far. Well. Played the green road until the very bad end as immigrants from Green Islands and that shocked me enough to make me stop playing it from some time. Anyway.
I tried playing again, pink (sharon) route, as French immigrants from the Marianne Empire when I noticed some problems. "Ignoring Charlotte" and "Ignoring Sharon" both lead to Marie ignoring Charlotte. And I don't know why, but the Act II seems to end right away if I pick an option about Sharon's clique being there, and Act III starts then.
I'm a bit confused. Can I have some help please ? Thank you.
(Also, as a French person, I second what was said earlier. J'en avoir plein le cul is not... grammarly correct, no one says Sacre bleu (it's Sacrebleu, which no one says either. No idea why people are saying tigress or lion or little lion. I'm confused.)
Late to the conversation, but it seems to me that every civilization you pick is a mashup of several real-world cultures, not just one. For example, the Gaikokuan civilization seems to have English elements as well as Japanese ones. The stuff about big cats may not be relevant to France, but it might very well be relevant to another culture in the mashup.
Hello! I also enjoyed your game quite a bit, it's really fantastic. However, I also seem to be barred from reaching the true ending. I cannot craft the Plowshare because it disappears as an option as soon as I buy the shovel, and if I go down the death route enough to get both the plowshare and the shiv on the same place, I also get the error 'You cannot build this now'. I'm not sure what to do here @.@
Hey! i'm a big fan of the game, and really enjoy the different languages the characters swear with.
I especially enjoy the french, as a French myself, but some of the uses of terms just don't work...
"J'en avoir plein le cul" is wrongly conjugate. You should say "J'enai plein le cul". "avoir" is infinitive, so it can't be used in a conjugated sentence.
"Hélas", meaning "Sadly", with something changing. Simply saying "Hélas !", as simply saying "Sadly!" doesn't mean anything. If you want to use has-been traditionnal words, for the caricature, you may replace it with "Sacrebleu !" (nobody says sacrebleu in french, be reassured), or, for more modern terms, "Flûte !" which is a polite version of "Merde !" meaning "Damn it !"
little last thing, in french, the exclamation point is seperated to the rest of the sentence with a space. Exemple : "Bonjour !", not "Bonjour!"
These are the more common errors, but they are more charming that offensive. Seeing you, english-speaking people, saying French words is very cute, cause the English accent in French is consider cute, as for the French accent in English (from what i know).
Anyway, thanks for your game !
This game is so wonderful, I'm really enjoying it a lot! I'm working towards the true ending, but I can't make the plow -- the option to create it disappears as soon as I get the shovel. Is there a way around this?
Thank you for your time and for making such a thoughtful and engaging game. As a second-gen immigrant myself, I really appreciated this experience.
hey! I was stuck on this for a while. you have access to more purple options in each act, so I suggest the following: keep visiting 'dad' until the option no longer produces an outcome, then play the pink route until act 2 starts. the next act will have more purple plot points, max those out then continue the pink route for act 3, you'll be able to complete the story then
That command wouldn’t work on an actual command line. :P You can’t have spaces in command arguments. “rm -rf ~/Untitled Project.git” will delete the folder “~/Untitled” and the folder “Project.git”, they are treated separately.
You also don’t need the ~/ part if you’ve just launched a terminal, and you’re in your home folder already.
I love this game a lot, but I think I'm locked out of getting the true end? Or maybe I'm just not doing something right because I'm not sure if this is required for the "true" end. I get locked out of re-making the PVC bongstaff after the disco ball breaks. I'd assume that all the colored name items are required but I'm not sure. If anyone knows what's up or if I'm doing something wrong lmk!
I've enjoyed this game for a while on steam, and seeing it in this bundle reminded me how much I appreciate it and want others to see it for how wonderful it is too.
Iasmin/DELTAHEAD's wonderful art really brings the characters to life! And the writing hits even harder these days. It really goes the extra mile where each country feels like its own place.Its really interesting to me how even a fail state like "you don't have enough materials for a event you were planning on having because the dump didn't have what you need and you spent all your money on snacks" or "the same person robbed you three times on three different trips to the hardware store despite your best efforts at not engaging and arguing back" becomes richer with characterization.
Sometimes I reread the Kickstarter pages and wonder about things that could have been, but that just makes me all the more satisfied this tale got to be told.
(PS- does Eris only unlock on a playthrough when you've reached a ending in all of the main four's routes or do you have to go through all the possiblities? I can't seem to get her to pop up.)
[code]
I'm sorry, but an uncaught exception occurred.
While running game code:
File "game/script.rpy", line 126, in script call
File "game/progression.rpy", line 1955, in script call
File "game/progression.rpy", line 685, in script call
File "game/progression.rpy", line 2186, in script call
File "game/arcs/mundane/famine_dad.rpy", line 466, in script
File "game/arcs/mundane/famine_dad.rpy", line 466, in <module>
KeyError: u'famineDadAssertiveness'
-- Full Traceback ------------------------------------------------------------
Full traceback:
File "game/script.rpy", line 126, in script call
File "game/progression.rpy", line 1955, in script call
File "game/progression.rpy", line 685, in script call
File "game/progression.rpy", line 2186, in script call
File "game/arcs/mundane/famine_dad.rpy", line 466, in script
File "D:\Games\itch\Four Horsemen\FourHorsemen-1.20-pc\renpy\ast.py", line 814, in execute
renpy.python.py_exec_bytecode(self.code.bytecode, self.hide, store=self.store)
File "D:\Games\itch\Four Horsemen\FourHorsemen-1.20-pc\renpy\python.py", line 1719, in py_exec_bytecode
exec bytecode in globals, locals
File "game/arcs/mundane/famine_dad.rpy", line 466, in <module>
KeyError: u'famineDadAssertiveness'
Windows-8-6.2.9200
Ren'Py 6.99.12.4.2187
Four Horsemen 1.2000000
[/code]
Hi!
If I might humbly suggest, it would make sense to lower the price while the game is included in special bundles (many developers do during Humble Bundles).
Case in point, right now the Anime Rhapsody Bundle is pretty cheap and includes Four Horsemen, while there isn't even a 10% discount here or on Steam... Not telling you how to price your games, but I tend to avoid buying bundles (except Humble) because I prefer directly supporting the developers whose games I want to play, not having the revenue being split between 10 creators when I'm only going to play one or two of the games. But if the game remains full price it's hard to justify the standalone purchase.
Hi! I've played through two (or three??) paths of this game, and I'd love to finish it! Is there a guide or any sort of resource like that we can use to help us find different endings? The game told me I broke "the final seal," which made me think I successfully finished all four storylines, but it looks like I still haven't finished War's or Famine's, and I have absolutely NO clue where to go to finish them or even FIND them. Thank you!
Hi Cobaya (and others who have had this issue),
Apologies for the delay. There seems to be a conflict between Steam's policy around distributing keys and itch.io's policy for supplying Steam keys with purchases. I contacted itch.io support about this a while back but have yet to hear back from them.
Since it may be a while before this issue is resolved, I have manually requested a Steam key for you. You should receive it within a few hours.
Best,
Kevin
