A cold-war RTS played from the keyboard
Kiloton is a minimalist real-time strategy game about nationalism, military buildup and the threat of nuclear war. You play through a 2 to 4 hour singleplayer campaign while a possibly fascist computer terminal tells you to achieve "victory" and leaves the definition up to you. The tone borrows from Cold War material like Dr. Strangelove and WarGames, mixing the flat indifference of a control room with the stakes of annihilation. There is no lasting balance of power in the game, only final destruction, so a strong position can disappear quickly. The interface is abstract and pixel-based, and everything is controlled with the keyboard, so a keyboard is required to play.
Fighting on four fronts at once
Warfare in Kiloton splits into four forms: ground battles, air battles, ICBMs and ABMs, and economic support and proxy wars. Coming out of the Cold War alive means building competence in all four. Research is organized into four disciplines with five tiers each: ground combat, air defense, aircraft, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each tier you reach improves a specific property of the related assets, such as range, damage, health or speed. That leaves you with real choices about direction: pour into missile defense to shield your cities, strengthen the army to take enemy cities, or stack up silos and rely on deterrence.
Economy works differently from most strategy games. You do not manage money, you manage cities, and they grow or shrink over time based on your economic strength, which is a function of your population against your spending. Population is not an abstract number, it lives in destructible pixel cities on the map, and you can capture or destroy enemy population centers to cut off their ability to wage war.
Playing with friends
Multiplayer runs as P2P gameplay with up to 5 players. The store text frames it as conducting "diplomacy" on your "friends", which sets expectations for how those sessions tend to go. The same four theaters and research system apply, so alliances and betrayals play out across ground, air, missiles and economic pressure.
Before you start
The singleplayer campaign is described as highly replayable, supported by a procedural generation system and a custom scenario editor for making your own levels. Enemies have complex personalities and goals, so campaign runs can diverge. The one hard requirement is hardware: everything in Kiloton uses keyboard input, so plan to play at a machine with a keyboard rather than a controller.