As part of our goal, we wanted to build rich, deep-feeling game systems for Transistor, such that it’s impossible to experience the full breadth of the gameplay on a single play-through. This helps us ensure that first play-through will be as packed with as much interesting stuff as possible. At the same time, it creates a lot of opportunity to extend the game in ways we think are exciting. Enter what we call Recursion mode.

Recursion mode is unlocked after you finish Transistor’s story. You’ll then have the option to recurse through the experience, retaining your progression data — notably, your User Level and all the Transistor functions you’ve unlocked. This immediately opens up a lot of new gameplay as you’ll be discovering new function combinations all the way through your initial play-through of the game. You’ll also find some new surprises (that word again) in the content itself the second time around. Most notably, the composition of enemy forces you’ll encounter will be different — and it’ll be different just about every time you play. This means you can really sink your teeth into the core gameplay if, as we hope, you’ve taken a liking to it by the end of the game.