The apocalypse was not an explosion. It was not a plague. It was everything failing slowly, all at once. First the harvests. Five years later the governments were broken. Then came the droughts, the rationing, the short civil wars and the old diseases coming back.

People called it the Withering because there was never a single day you could point at and say it ended here. There was just less of everything, every year. By the time you start playing, more than eight years have passed since what survivors call the silence — the point where the radios went quiet and the patrols stopped coming.

You will not find smoking ruins. You will find emptiness. Towns with the lights still flickering on for an hour a day, cars stopped where the fuel ran dry, houses with dinner still on the table that nobody came back to eat.

And nature taking it back: tall grass through the pavement, animals wandering into what used to be streets. Wolves, boar, crows. Nothing mutated. Just whatever was left.