Press kit
Second Chance
Everyone else is going to Vice City.
You’re going to Radworth.
Everyone else is going to Vice City. You're going to Radworth. Second Chance is a first-person British life sim: out of prison on licence, into an empty terraced house, in a Midlands town you are not allowed to leave.
Download the whole kit (8.2 MB)
10 screenshots at 2560 × 1440, the logo and icons, and a readme. Everything below is also downloadable one file at a time.
Fact sheet
- Title
- Second Chance
- Developer
- Second Chance Game — one person, working solo
- Based in
- The United Kingdom
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5.8
- Platform
- PC (Windows). Nothing else is announced.
- Release date
- Not announced. There isn’t one, and anybody quoting you a date this early is guessing.
- Price
- Not announced. One price, paid once — no subscription, no season pass, nothing sold inside the game.
- Age rating
- None issued. Please don’t print a PEGI or ESRB number for it.
- Website
- secondchancegame.com
- Press contact
- [email protected]
Three things not to print. There is no release date, no price and no age rating — not "TBC 2027", not an estimate, and not a PEGI or ESRB number, because none has been issued. If you need something concrete for a deadline, ask me and I’ll tell you honestly what I do and don’t know.
Boilerplate
Paste these as they are; they are written to be quoted.
One line
Everyone else is going to Vice City. You're going to Radworth. Second Chance is a first-person British life sim: out of prison on licence, into an empty terraced house, in a Midlands town you are not allowed to leave.
One paragraph
Second Chance is a first-person life sim set in Oakhaven, an invented Midlands town of Victorian terraces, a ring road, a river and a council estate. The police drop you at 6 Radworth Road on licence with an empty house, an empty pocket and one condition: you may not leave the area. There is honest work going if you want it and there are other ways to make rent if you don't, and most people end up running both and hoping nobody is counting. Nothing waits for you. The pub opens whether you turn up or not, the neighbours walk to work whether you are watching or not, and the weather is the Midlands, so bring a coat. It is being built by one person in Unreal Engine 5, in the open, with the whole process published as a devlog.
The angle, if you’re covering the big one
Second Chance is the small, wet, British opposite of the game everybody will be writing about this year. No mansion, no speedboat, no crew, no montage. A council house with nothing in it, a licence you are on, a job centre appointment you cannot miss, a fry-up you can afford on Thursday and cannot on Friday. The open world is eight square kilometres of terraced streets and wheelie bins, and the fantasy is not power — it is getting through the week without going back inside. If the big one is the American dream at full volume, this is a Tuesday in the Midlands with the heating off.
Second Chance has nothing to do with Rockstar Games and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to them or to Grand Theft Auto in any way — that paragraph is a contrast, not a comparison, and it is there because it is the honest way to explain what this is. Please don’t frame it as a rival to anything. It is one person, eight square kilometres and a lot of wheelie bins.
What’s in it today
Everything on this list is built and playable now. Work that isn’t finished is on the roadmap on the homepage, marked as such — please don’t take anything from that column as a feature.
A town, not a level
8.1 km² of Oakhaven: 546 terraced houses, 31 amenity buildings, a ring road, a river with bridges and a council estate.
People who live somewhere
Twenty-five named residents, each with a front door that is genuinely theirs, walking the real road network on their own daily routines. Nobody stands about waiting to be triggered.
A voiced opening you didn’t choose
Two officers drive you across the estate, put you out at your new address and remind you of the terms.
A pub that runs itself
Charlotte serves twenty drinks off a physical menu you page through. Samantha sings from seven. Edward has been on the same stool since opening.
Honest work
Clock on to the fly-tip round: get picked up at six, hand-shift rubbish off the verges, drive it to the incinerator, get paid.
A phone in your pocket
An Android-style handset with working turn-by-turn satnav that routes on the actual roads, a town social feed, a taxi app and a camera.
A car at the kerb
Yours, automatic, and it will go anywhere the road network goes — with a radio in the dash playing what the town is playing.
Weather that isn’t decoration
A full day/night cycle and randomised weather. Rain comes in, the light goes flat, the ground turns to mud and the streetlamps come on one at a time down the terrace.
A real sky
Every star comes out of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue and sits where it should, with the moon at its correct phase.
Wildlife, and a bonnet
Nineteen species living in the hedgerows on their own hours. They keep clear of you on foot. They are less careful about a car.
A way down
A capped well out past the ring road, a rope ladder, and twelve stretches of worked passage under the fields.
Screenshots
Real in-game captures at 2560 × 1440. Nothing here is a bullshot, a render or a composite. Click any of them for the full-size image.
Logo and icons
- wordmark.svg 9 KB
- icon-512.png 2 KB
- icon-192.png 1 KB
- favicon.ico 3 KB
- cover.jpg 90 KB
Video
The devlog series covers the whole build, start to finish, and is the best source of moving footage until there’s a trailer. The playlist → · Written devlog →
There is no trailer yet. When there is one, it will be linked here first.
About the developer
Second Chance is made by one person in the UK, in Unreal Engine 5.8, with no studio and no publisher. The build is documented in public as it happens — including the parts that go wrong, which is most of them.
It's a town that was getting on perfectly well before you turned up, and it will carry on getting on whether you sort yourself out or not. What you do about that is the game.
On what it is
There's no studio behind this. Everything that breaks, breaks in public — that's what the devlog is for.
On building it alone
Permissions
You may use anything in this kit in coverage of the game, including monetised video and articles, without asking me first. You don’t need a licence and I won’t send you one. If you want something that isn’t here — a particular shot, a specific location, footage of something you’ve seen in the devlog — ask, and if it exists I’ll capture it for you.
Oakhaven, Radworth, and every person, business and publication in the game are fictional, and any resemblance to a real place or person is not intended.
Contact
Email [email protected]. It’s me who reads it, so it may take a day, but it will be an actual answer rather than a form one.