ASPIS Lore Explained: Andrey, the PEP-01, and the Game's Two Endings

ASPIS lore looks like a familiar setup at first: a Soviet research institute, an experimental machine, and a man who wants one more hour with his family. What makes the story worth tracking is how quickly that setup stops behaving like a simulation. Understanding ASPIS lore matters because Dream Wire Games has built a game where the final scene is a single decision — and that decision only carries weight if you know why Andrey volunteered in the first place.

One note on searching: this term also pulls up unrelated namesakes from tabletop roleplaying and ancient history. Everything below concerns only the Dream Wire Games title on Steam.

What ASPIS Lore Is Actually About

The official Steam listing describes a story-driven first-person horror game set in the late-1980s USSR. That phrase undersells the structure a little. This is not a haunted-corridor game with lore stapled to the walls; the lore is the puzzle, and the environment is how you read it.

According to the store page, you explore, find documents and records, and interface with OGAS terminals to piece together what happened during the experiment. The narrative is delivered through the world itself, through character encounters, and through cinematic scenes rather than through a narrator.

That design choice shapes how ASPIS lore should be approached. Details about the volunteers, the Institute, and the machine's original purpose are scattered across readable material and encounters, so a player who rushes the endings will finish the game with most of their questions intact.

The Premise: Six Volunteers, One Year, No One Wakes Up

The setup is compact and grim. In 1987, six volunteers are connected to ASPIS, an experimental system designed to predict historical events. A year later, not one of them has woken up.

Andrey, an engineer, agreed to take part for a very specific reason: a single chance to see his deceased wife, Anna, and his daughter, Liza, again. Instead of generating the controlled simulation the creators promised, the system opens a path to places they never intended to reach.

All rows are drawn from the official Steam listing at https://store.steampowered.com/app/3129420/ASPIS/ as captured on 2026-10-22. The planned release date shown that day was October 23, 2026.

The developer behind the story

ASPIS is an independent project from Dream Wire Games, which both develops and publishes it. The store page carries an explicit disclosure that AI tools were used for select music tracks, voice-over lines, and visual assets, while the world, environments, gameplay mechanics, scene direction, and overall visual identity were designed and crafted by the developer.

The page also lists two IGROPROM Online 2026 awards as of the same 2026-10-22 snapshot: first place in the "IGROPROM Choice" category and Best Solo Developer. Treat those as dated page content rather than evergreen status.

Inside the Machine: PEP-01, Energy X, and Astral Windows

The most interesting piece of ASPIS lore is also the most mechanical, and that is not a coincidence. The game's fiction and its puzzle logic are the same object.

What Energy X actually does

Andrey carries the PEP-01, a device that interacts with a substance called Energy X. According to the store page, the tool can capture and transfer Energy X, power machinery with it, and change the state of specific mechanisms. That last function is the one that matters most for navigation — a mechanism in one state may be inert, while the same mechanism in another state opens a route.

Astral windows and layered reality

The PEP-01 also lets Andrey open astral windows between different layers of reality. Objects that cannot be reached in one version of the world can be seen and extracted from another, which turns exploration into a spatial puzzle rather than a scavenger hunt.

Read that against the setting and the ASPIS lore becomes clearer. The machine was built to model historical events, and instead it produces overlapping versions of places — including distorted versions of recognizable locations, ancient structures, and worlds that existed long before the system was ever switched on.

Combat sits in the same grounded register. The Makarov pistol and melee attacks are the tools available, and ammunition plus other resources have to be found along the way. The official sources do not document purchase or restock behavior.

The Cast of ASPIS Lore: Andrey, the Cat, and the Devil

Andrey is not alone inside the system. The store page confirms that he encounters other volunteers, the Institute Director, and beings who seem to understand the worlds opened by the machine far better than he does.

Two of those figures carry most of the mystery:

• A talking Cat who knows the ancient pathways through these spaces and clearly grasps what is happening, but shares less than he knows.
• The Devil, encountered in one of the worlds Andrey passes through.

Neither gives Andrey the whole picture, and that withholding is deliberate. Review coverage quoted on the Steam page makes the same point from a player's perspective: "ASPIS is also very good at building intrigue: it leaves behind plenty of questions without direct answers" (VGTimes).

The deeper Andrey goes, the more tightly the experiment connects back to his original reason for entering it — which is where the story stops being a tour of strange places and becomes personal again.

How ASPIS Lore Ends: One Choice, Two Endings

The finale is a single decision. The player makes one choice that determines Andrey's fate and leads to one of two endings. That is the entirety of what the official material confirms, so treat any flowchart claiming a longer branch map with suspicion.

What the available material does support is the thematic shape of that choice. Andrey entered ASPIS for a chance to see his wife and daughter, and the journey keeps bending back toward that motive. A final decision framed by grief, and by everything the system has shown him about the worlds it was never meant to reach, is the payoff the story has been building toward.

Content warnings before you dive in

The developers list scenes of violence, blood, and psychological horror; themes of death, loss of loved ones, experiments on consciousness, and the consequences of disasters; moments designed to cause anxiety with sudden frightening images and sound effects; and sharp flashes of light that may affect photosensitive players. If any of that is a concern, read the full mature-content section on the store page before buying.

ASPIS Lore FAQ

Is this ASPIS connected to the Aspis Consortium from Pathfinder? No. They share a name and nothing else. The ASPIS covered here is the Dream Wire Games horror title published on Steam, not a tabletop faction.

How many endings does ASPIS have? Two, according to the official store page. The finale presents a single decision that determines Andrey's fate and resolves into one of two endings.

What is Energy X in ASPIS lore? Energy X is the substance the PEP-01 manipulates. Andrey can capture and transfer it, use it to power machinery, and change the state of mechanisms with it — which is also how he opens astral windows between layers of reality.

When does ASPIS come out? As of the 2026-10-22 snapshot of the official Steam listing at https://store.steampowered.com/app/3129420/ASPIS/, the planned release date was October 23, 2026, and the game was still marked as not yet available. That same snapshot recorded no user reviews yet, so check the store page for the live status rather than relying on a dated count.

The short version of ASPIS lore: a machine built to predict the past, a man who wanted his family back, and a system that answered with worlds nobody designed. If that combination appeals, the store page is the place to confirm current availability before you commit.