This article was originally published on March 20, 2026 - read the full issue

By Marie Dealessandri

Speculative Agency has a couple of days left of its Kickstarter campaign for All Will Rise, but the €46,000 raised has already smashed an initial funding goal of €10,000. At a time of global unrest, the game's story of taking a billionaire to court for a river's murder has evidently resonated with an audience keen to witness digital climate justice, for want of anything better. The dev collective also made headlines last week when it announced that it was joining the No Games For Genocide boycott and planning to hand back Microsoft funding.

Ahead of a late-2026 release, Speculative Agency hopes for bottom-up funding that will help it deliver both on innovative, engaging gameplay and getting people invested in day-to-day social movements. No mean feat.

The idea originated with Joost Vervoort's real-life activism. A game designer and associate professor at Utrecht University, he leads research on games and sustainability. As part of Dutch group Fossielvrij ('Dutch Friends of the Earth'), he contributed to a case against pension fund ABP for breaking the Paris agreement.

"I thought of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series, and I [thought that] a game like that – sort of wild, joyous, slightly absurd – about climate court cases could be really interesting," he recalls.

Depicting the reality of social action

The idea snowballed from there, and the team, most notably composed of former Guerilla Interactive staff as well as veteran narrative director Meghna Jayanth, came together quite organically. Soon enough, ten people spread across various continents were working on what would become All Will Rise.

Vervoort took on the role of science and impact director, saying he is "co-responsible" for All Will Rise's vision. But thinking about impact can only come second to making a good game, he says.

"The way I see impact with All Will Rise really reflects on it having to be a really good game. From the perspective of games and societal change, a lot of games that are made by educators aren't great. You don't get the same passion for an educational game that you get for a Disco Elysium. So we are making a game that's a damn good game, first and foremost; really well written, that looks great, that has really interesting and deep mechanics woven with the story."

Choosing the right setting was key to this, he continues. Considering part of the team's roots in India, they opted for a speculative version of the Kerala state, and a city called Muziris – which no longer exists.

"You want to constantly feel like: what is the same as our world here? What is different? This sort of speculative ambiguity is there. That, to me, is part of the so-called impact: understanding that a game that doesn't have an exciting space to explore with interesting characters and deep narrative is not going to do anything. What we want to achieve with the game, in terms of societal impact, is to make people excited about the day-to-day work of social organising. It's dramatic, it's exciting, it's funny, it's stupid. You have to deal with a lot of idiots.

"All Will Rise is a game that doesn't have a monolithic opinion about things. We want that to be alive, because that's the reality of social action – it's a lot of people disagreeing with each other."

Making All Will Rise inevitable

This duality of having to be good alongside saying something important was also at the heart of Nyamakop's work, with Vervoort echoing sentiments shared by Relooted creative director Ben Myres with Knowledge a few weeks back. Vervoort agrees on the similarities, though the two games have very different contexts.

"I think people are trying to work out how to do this, how to make games that have a great vibe and that don't try to be 'goody two shoes'. That's happening more. Relooted is a really good example. It feels very similar in intention to All Will Rise. That sort of irreverent, subversive, wild, slightly challenging and controversial take on things? It's exactly our vibe.

"It's certainly a longer tradition in film, to have really cool stories about deep societal issues that are engaging as hell. So why not games?"

We posit a maturity issue, both in the industry and its audience – films are several decades ahead of videogames, after all. But Vervoort counters the argument that it's difficult to make games with social impact.

"I don't really know if it is that difficult. Look, game design is difficult, right? But there's an audience for these kinds of games, and getting the games funded is more difficult. We are doing a Kickstarter for a reason."

Financing is a tall ordeal for any game, but a project tackling politics adds a layer of complexity. Crowdfunding fits the game's message, and Speculative Agency handing back the Microsoft funds strengthened that stance.

"We had conversations with interested publishers a while back. [They] were generally quite interested, but because of the financial situation everywhere, they were conservative, and afraid of backlash to the politics of a game like this.

"At some point we were like: 'We just want to make this game inevitable – it's got to happen.' We believe that there are many people out there who are sick of billionaires, sick of corporations, who are maybe walking around with revenge fantasies in their head, but there's nothing they can do about it. So we hoped that we would find our audience ourselves, which is very difficult. But the Kickstarter is going well. We also thought that it would fit a game like this. A game about social movements and bottom-up action against the powerful elites; it would be very fitting if that game gets funded bottom-up as well."

Vervoort is hoping for the Kickstarter to reach €50,000 by the end of the campaign. The studio was helped along the way by various organisations, including De Collectieve Beweging ('The Collective Movement'), a Dutch activist group that pledged €2,500. And entangling real-life social action with the game is exactly what the developer was hoping to accomplish.

"We have this desire to contribute in a real way. We hope that All Will Rise will be played by many people, and that [they will be] more likely to get involved with social organising. That it's an inspiration."

He describes it as a "playground": play around in a low-stakes situation, then apply it to real life. And then of course there's the studio goal to be able to make the next game, building upon All Will Rise's original concept.

"We found a really great formula in terms of gameplay, genre, thematic approach, and the way everything looks. That's the hard part. If All Will Rise becomes successful, then we want to go to other parts of the world. We had some really nice feedback [saying] that this really feels like a majority-world game, the type of day-to-day activism that's in All Will Rise. They felt like it was a breath of fresh air from more western perspectives on activism.

"We hope to bring the game to all platforms [but] the first we want to consider is mobile, because if it's a global game, a majority-world game, then in many parts of the world people are more likely to play games on their phones.

"What we want to do with All Will Rise is also pave the way for this type of game… The All Will Rise, the Relooted, the Sparrow Warfare – these games that try to do something with politics, but in a fun and engaging way."

This article was originally published on March 20, 2026 - read the full issue