The Nobody:
An Odyssey
The Odyssey, told by the man it forgot — in real time, on your phone, one message at a time.
Everything here is free to use, quote, and reproduce. Review codes on request.
Factsheet
- Title
- The Nobody: An Odyssey
- Developer
- Errata LLC
- Release date
- 24 July 2026
- Platform
- iPhone, iOS 15.0 or later. Chapter One plays free in any browser.
- Price
- $2.99 one-time, regional equivalents apply. No ads, no in-app purchases, no subscription.
- Genre
- Interactive fiction · adventure · epistolary
- Length
- Eight chapters, Ismarus to Thrinacia. Real time across several days; a setting collapses the waiting.
- Engine
- Ink, inkle's narrative scripting language, on inkjs
- Age rating
- 16+
- Size
- 7.2 MB
- Data collected
- None. No accounts, no analytics, no network calls.
- App Store
- apps.apple.com/app/id6790462410
- Play free
- playthenobody.com/play
- Press contact
- hello@playthenobody.com
Description — copy freely
The Odyssey, told by the man it forgot — a real-time story that arrives on your phone one message at a time.
Homer names Polites once — the dearest of Odysseus's companions — and then lets him vanish into a crew that never reached home. Three thousand years later his messages arrive on your phone, in real time, as the voyage happens. What you say back decides whether he survives it.
The Nobody: An Odyssey is a story told entirely in text messages, from a rower on Odysseus's ship. Polites is a real figure in Homer, named exactly once and called the dearest of Odysseus's companions — and then never mentioned again. He is not given a death scene. He simply stops appearing, and dies somewhere in the unrecorded mass of a crew that never reached Ithaca. This game is the stretch of poem that was never written. Messages arrive in real time over several days: he writes when he can, goes quiet when the ship demands it, and sleeps through the night while you do. Some choices are timed, and silence counts as an answer. He does not know what you are, and you never learn why he can reach you. Survival is possible but rare — most of the endings are the ones the poem already implies. Eight chapters, Ismarus to Thrinacia, authored in Ink.
Why now
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened on 17 July 2026, and the poem is in front of a very large audience again — as a story about a king. This is the same voyage from the other end of the boat. The premise is also an argument about the poem: it's full of men who die in a single clause, and Polites is the clearest case, because Homer stops to tell you he mattered and then never returns to him.
What's Homer's, what's invented
One disambiguation: the Polites of the Odyssey is not the Trojan prince of the same name, a son of Priam killed in the sack of the city.
Features
- Real-time pacing. Messages arrive over hours, not scenes. He goes quiet when the ship demands it and sleeps through the night. A setting turns this off.
- Silence is a choice. Some decisions are timed. Saying nothing is an answer, and the game records it as one.
- Nothing is scored on screen. What you've done accumulates quietly and settles in the final chapter.
- Four endings. Survival is the rare one — reaching it means breaking with the poem.
- Text only. No illustration. Ocean ambience, no music.
- No data collection. No accounts, analytics, ads, or in-app purchases. Works in airplane mode.
How it was made
The branching is authored in Ink, inkle's open-source narrative scripting language, and runs on inkjs inside a Capacitor wrapper for iOS. The whole game is around seven megabytes and never touches the network while you play it. The hard problem wasn't the branching but the clock: a story that unfolds over real days has to survive being closed, backgrounded, killed overnight, and reopened three days later — still at the right moment, with the right time still owed.
Assets
Screenshots are 6.5-inch iPhone captures (1242 × 2688 px); the icon is the 1024 px App Store artwork. Reproduce, crop, and colour-correct freely for editorial use. Credit "Errata LLC" where a credit line is required.
Review copies
App Store promo codes are available to press, critics, and streamers — email hello@playthenobody.com and one comes back the same day. No embargo, no conditions, no approval over what you write.
One note for reviewing on deadline: the game paces itself over real days by design, so a full playthrough takes about a week at its intended speed. Turning off real-time pacing in the settings plays the whole story through in roughly two hours without missing anything.
Selected coverage
Contact
Interviews, review codes, additional assets, or questions about the source material.