Second Chance 18+

You’re out on licence. Get a proper job, or go back to what you know.

Second Chance is a first-person British open-world life sim. Two officers drive you across Oakhaven, put you out at 6 Radworth Road with an empty house and an empty pocket, and remind you of the one condition on your licence: you may not leave the area. Eight square kilometres of red-brick terraces, a ring road, a river and a council estate. What you make of it is entirely yours.

Everyone else is going to Vice City. You’re going to Radworth.

The demo goes to this list before it goes anywhere else. One person is making all of it, in the open.

  • 8.1 km²Of Oakhaven, walkable
  • 546Terraced houses
  • 1,010Wheelie bins
  • 1Person building it

Released today

12 new weather & gameplay screenshots

Lightning over the terraces, rain soaking through a waistcoat, a Radworth sunset, and the first look at the Great Radworth Flood.

See all twelve →

The choice

One second chance. Two ways to spend it.

This is the decision your second chance hangs on. The inciting incident of this game is being told to behave, on a pavement, by a woman in a bowler hat. What you do after that is up to you, and you can change your mind as often as you like.

The choice in Second Chance: the work on the crime path and on the honest path, side by side
Crime Path Back to what you know Honest Path Get a proper job
Grow weed in the cellar

Lamps, fans, a timer, and a meter that never stops going round. The electric comes out of your pocket every week, crop or no crop.

 Sign on at the job centre

Denise tests you with a ruler drop, a sorting test and fifteen seconds of holding steady, and the work she offers depends on how you do.
Bag it up and deal it

You’ll bag up the harvest, meet a supplier, and find out how many people notice a lad with a lot of small bags.

 The fly-tipping round

The alarm goes at half nine, Wozza picks you up in the council flatbed, and it pays £2.25 an item and £8 a site.
Break into houses

You’ll have to get the flat-screen home through the back streets before a neighbour rings it in, then keep it or sell it on.

 The bin round

Sit through the induction film, then get out behind the wagon. Oakhaven has 1,010 wheelie bins.
Try the car doors

Houses won’t be the only thing on the street worth breaking into.

 Deliveries on the YouChew e-bike

You’ll carry other people’s tea across town while it’s still hot, with a satnav that has its own ideas.
Steal cars and sell them on

You’ll be able to drive off in somebody else’s motor and find a buyer who won’t ask where it came from.

 Shifts at the Slag & Slurry

Cleaning shifts at the pub, the toilets included. Somebody has to.
More crime on the way

This side of the table grows as the game does, until the two sides weigh the same.

 Scrub off the graffiti

Getting it back off the walls and the wheelie bins, one tag at a time.
Roadkill for the butcher’s

Bagshaws will give you something for whatever the ring road left on the verge.
Where it leads People selling for you

Further up the other road, you’ll have people selling for you, and it will run every bit as far as the honest one.

 Where it leads Work your way up

Stick at it and it will keep going up: running the round, a seat on the council, the local MP, and in the end the person Oakhaven turns to when the river comes over the bank.

Most people will run a bit of each and hope the counting stays casual. Either way, the stakes are British ones: failure here costs you money, embarrassment or your licence rather than a body count, and the police station is ninety-odd metres from your front door.

Waiting for GTA 6?

GTA 6 takes you where the story goes. Radworth takes you where the rent does.

Everybody is counting down to GTA 6, and fair enough. But if the part you love about a big open world is simply living in it, here is what Radworth does its own way.

The GTA 6 lines come from Rockstar’s own announcements and from the YouTubers and X posters who went to the GTA 6 preview. The game is out on 19 November 2026, so treat every one of them as speculation until then, and I’ll put this section right the moment the real thing says otherwise. Second Chance is an independent game with no connection to Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive.

Get the demo first It goes to the list before it goes anywhere else.

The people

Every resident of Oakhaven has a life of their own to get on with

At six in the morning Edward is already walking to the Slag & Slurry, because Edward always is. Denise is unlocking the job centre on Bestholme Road. Out past the ring road a wagon is starting its round. Twenty-five people, twenty-five front doors down twenty-eight streets, a hundred and fifty separate places to be across seventeen destinations - and every one of them on a life that was written before you turned up.

It is arranged entirely for its own convenience rather than yours. Each resident runs an hour-by-hour schedule - home, work, the shop, the chippy, the pub, the club, walking the dog - and walks it on the same pavements, kerbs and pelican crossings you do, in and out of a front door that is genuinely theirs. Follow one home and you will find their house.

And they carry on while you are looking the other way. Where somebody is gets worked out from the clock rather than from where you happen to be standing - so a woman four streets away, in a part of town the engine has quietly put to sleep, is exactly where the time of day says she is. Walk into the pub at nine and Edward has been on that stool since opening, because that is where the afternoon left him.

There is no tutorial, and there are no labels floating over anybody’s head. You find out who somebody is the way you would anywhere else, which is by talking to them. It is a town that was getting on perfectly well before you arrived and will carry on getting on whether you sort yourself out or otherwise.

Inside Radworth

What’s waiting when you get there

This is Second Chance as it will be when it’s finished. Some of it you could walk into today and some of it is still being built, and the devlog keeps an honest record of which is which, as it happens.

Work

  1. Sign on at Bestholme Job Centre

    Denise has a great deal to say to you, and every word of it is delivered by a woman who finished caring some years ago. Take a seat, get called through, and explain what exactly you’ve been doing with yourself since you got out. Then comes the assessment: a ruler dropped between your fingers, a sorting test, and a needle to hold in a green zone that won’t keep still. The work she offers you depends on how you do.

    The strip lighting alone will make you want a job.

    An adviser sits at a desk in the Bestholme job centre under flat strip lighting, rows of empty desks and chairs behind her.

  2. Clock on: somebody has fly-tipped on the verge again

    The alarm goes at half nine. Wozza picks you up in the liveried flatbed and you spend the morning hand-shifting other people’s rubbish off the verges - cab, load, cab, load - then drive it out to the incinerator, tip it and get paid. Eighteen spots around the edges of Oakhaven, forty items dumped across them: a sheet of corrugated iron, a wire cage trolley, rubble sacks, a mattress going soft in the rain. Each has a weight, a carry distance and somewhere you can get the flatbed in.

    The council lorry that comes to collect it has FLY-TIPPING IS A CRIME, FIXED PENALTY £600 written across the tailboard. Honest work, and exactly as glamorous as it sounds.

    Fly-tipped rubbish on rough grass beside a road: a sheet of corrugated iron, a wire cage trolley and rubble sacks, with a stone arch bridge in the distance.

  3. Deliveries on the YouChew e-bike

    The bike is built and waiting at the kerb: a red YouChew box on the back, a battery with its charge lights showing, and a bracket on the bars for your phone. The job that goes with it will put you on shift carrying other people’s tea across town while it’s still hot, with a satnav that has its own ideas about the quickest way there.

    Also on the books: the bin round, with an induction film to sit through first; cleaning shifts and the toilets at the Slag & Slurry; scrubbing the graffiti back off the bins; and whatever Bagshaws will give you for what the ring road left on the verge.

    A black delivery e-bike at the kerb, seen from above: a red YOUCHEW box on the rear rack, a battery on the frame with its charge lights showing green, and a phone bracket on the handlebars.

Play

  1. Last Tenner Bets, and the arcade down the road

    Single-zero roulette on a proper table, with Toby calling the wheel in a Yorkshire accent and every one of the hundred and fifty-seven bets placed by putting your chips down on the board. River of Riches and Country Escapes by the window. MIGHTY OAKS scratchcards at two pounds, taken off with the edge of a fifty pence piece.

    Down at Penny Drop Amusements, Cold Snap is a two-deck 10p pusher running on real physics: drop a coin in one of five slots, watch it slide down the glass onto its edge, and wait for the shelf to do the rest. Back at the pub, Acorn Fortune gives back about eighty pence in the pound over a long evening, and says so on the glass.

    Two fruit machines side by side in Last Tenner Bets: RIVER OF RICHES in blue and COUNTRY ESCAPES in green, each with a lit paytable, three reels and a row of trail panels, and a MIGHTY OAKS scratchcard dispenser at the left edge at two pounds a go.

  2. Barry, the snooker hustler

    The Baulk Line is a 1904 north-light billiard hall with eight full-size tables under a glass roof, and Barry is usually at one of them. Pick up a cue and he’ll offer to make it interesting for a fiver.

    The mechanics are modelled on top players. He plays the same physics and rulebook you do, and that rulebook was checked against an independent oracle in 29,832 cases. If you’d like to read the rules before you hand him your money, they’re all written up.

    Barry standing between two full-size snooker tables in the Baulk Line with a cue held upright at his side, daylight falling through the north-light roof onto the cloth and high windows down the wall behind him.

  3. Your tea is in the river

    Take a rod down to the Oakhaven, put a maggot on the hook and cast out past the reeds. The fish you see are the fish you catch: perch, trout and the odd salmon, each one swimming up to your bait under its own steam and each its own size. A pair of polarised glasses shows you what’s down there.

    And you keep it. You’ll be able to cook it on a disposable barbecue on the bank and eat it there and then, or take it round the back of the chippy, where the kitchen door will buy it off you and ask very little about the salmon.

    The Oakhaven river on a clear day: olive-green water, reeds along the near bank, a small yellow dinghy drifting mid-stream, and past the far bank the ring road, a row of streetlamps and the incinerator chimney.

  4. The Slag & Slurry

    Charlotte’s behind the bar. Pick up the menu, page through it properly, choose one of twenty drinks, and she’ll fetch it, pour it, carry it over and take your money. Five hundred pounds went in. Four hundred and ninety-three fifteen came out.

    Samantha sings from seven - Irish, folk, a bit of country - and there’s bingo. Edward has been on the same stool since opening and he will be on it when she packs up.

    Charlotte behind the bar of the Slag & Slurry under a sign reading live singer 7pm and quiz night 8pm, beer pumps and bottles along the counter.

  5. Ten things on the board

    Chish & Fips does fish, chips, pies, battered sausage and mushy peas, and the fryer has been going long enough to have opinions. You queue, you order, you collect - and then, this being the Midlands and it being cold, you eat it on the walk home rather than waiting until you get there. What you do with the wrapper is between you and the bin, and the bins on this estate are watched more closely than you would think.

    A chip shop frontage: CHISH & FIPS in blue lettering on a white fascia, the serving hatch open, the hot cabinet lit and two staff working behind the counter.

People

  1. They all actually live somewhere

    Twenty-five of them, with more moving in. Each has a name, a front door and a hundred and fifty places to be, and they walk the real road network - round the corner, over the bridge, past the chippy. Follow one home and you will find their house. It is genuinely their house. There are 546 of those houses and 1,010 wheelie bins to go with them, because somebody has to put them out.

    A red-brick terraced street after rain, wet tarmac reflecting the sky, blue and green front doors, telegraph wires overhead, wheelie bins along the kerb and a red car parked up the road.

  2. Meet someone at the Sweatbox

    “You’ve been holding that pillar up for twenty minutes. It’s not going anywhere, love.” That’s Christie, and she’ll talk to you while the music keeps going: three answers, and a few seconds to pick one before the moment passes.

    She’s the first person in Oakhaven you can properly get to know, and she won’t be the last. You choose who, it has to be earned, and turning up every night to crowd her gets you exactly the answer you’d expect. Walk her to the taxi rank at chucking-out time and see where it goes.

    A terraced street at night under sodium streetlamps, light diffusing through haze, lit windows down the terrace and the Sweatbox's neon sign glowing in the distance.

The town

  1. Eight square kilometres of it

    Oakhaven is not a corridor with houses painted on the walls. Five hundred and forty-six houses, a ring road, a river, a council estate, a golf course and an incinerator - all of it joined up, and all of it walkable from your own front door. The spire and the chimney on that skyline are both real places on the map.

    An aerial view across Oakhaven: street after street of Victorian terraces under slate roofs, with a church spire and an incinerator chimney on the skyline.

  2. A phone worth getting out

    Tab brings up an Android-style handset with five apps and a camera. Gogo Maps puts live markers on you, your house, your car, the e-bike and the bus, and talks you there turn by turn in a Midlands accent, on the actual roads. Gopher Cabs sends a car to wherever you’re stood. Very Local is the town’s social feed, where you post, people react and the neighbours post about you. Whatsupp brings the messages in.

    The weather on the home screen is reading the actual sky, and the camera quietly scores how well you framed the shot.

    First-person in a car with the in-game Android-style handset held up on the right: clock, date, weather and cash on the home screen, app icons below, and the player's to-do reminder to sign on at the job centre showing in the HUD.

  3. The sky over Radworth does what the sky does

    Cloud builds through the afternoon and breaks up towards evening - proper British cloud, the kind that can’t make its mind up. Then the rain comes in early and stays late. The brick goes dark, the gutters run, water stands in the ruts along the verge, and the road holds the streetlamps in it for an hour after it has stopped. Then the sun drops under the cloud at six and every wet roof on the terrace catches it at once.

    When it clears at night, every star over Radworth comes out of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue and sits where it should, with the Milky Way across the middle and the moon at its proper phase. It’s the Midlands. Bring a coat, and look up.

    Low evening sun raking across waterlogged ground after rain, puddles catching the light in a bright path, hedgerow and terraced roofs in silhouette.

  4. Nineteen kinds of animal, all of them keeping their own hours

    The hedgerows and verges have things living in them - nineteen species, each keeping its own hours, so the rabbits and the pheasants belong to the daylight and the foxes and the badgers come out when you’d rather they didn’t. Get close on foot and they bolt for cover long before you reach them.

    They are not nearly so careful about a car. Catch one at any speed worth the name and that’s the end of it: the body goes down under the wheel, stays down, and is still lying there when you come back past. Get it to Bagshaws while it’s fresh and Michael will make you an offer.

    Shot to comeA fox on a verge at dusk, caught in the headlamps.

  5. There is a way down

    A mile out past the north ring road, in the middle of nowhere in particular, there’s a capped well with a rope ladder going down it. Climb down and the town stops. Two hundred metres of worked passage, torches burning in brackets driven into the rock, braziers on the floor where the roof is high enough to take them, and drops in the dark that you would not walk off twice.

    It has been down there a great deal longer than the terraces have, and there are old things to find in it - worth a good deal more to the right buyer than to the wrong one.

    A rush torch burning in an iron bracket driven into worked rock deep below Radworth, throwing its shadow on the wall, a stalactite hanging in the dark beyond.

Also in Oakhaven

The demo goes to the list first, before it goes anywhere else.

Get the demo
You may not leave the area.

It’s a condition of your licence. Everyone who’s been out here a while will tell you it isn’t the only reason.

A folded copy of the Oakhaven Gazette lying on a doormat, front page headline reading Fore-ty eight quid a round.

Free to every house

The Oakhaven Gazette

It lands on the mat at 6 Radworth Road every week, and in the game you pick it up off the doormat and read it standing in your own hall. It reports what has actually happened in Oakhaven - the golf club’s green fees, who got the bin contract, which pub is after a cleaner - and it never advertises anything you can’t go and do.

Read the latest issue

How it’s being built

Come and watch it get built

The building of it lives in the devlog, and that’s also where you can see exactly what’s playable today and what’s still on its way. Start anywhere in the playlist; it goes back to when Oakhaven was an empty grey box.

Title frame of the Second Chance devlog series on YouTube.

Your browser only reaches YouTube once you press play. Watch the full playlist → The channel →

Devlog

Everything that broke, and why

I write up the work as it happens - what I was trying to do, what I used, the trap I fell into, and what the fix turned out to be. It is meant to be useful to anyone building something similar, so the headings are the symptoms rather than the diagnoses.

  1. Mean Free Path
  2. Kicking-Out Time
  3. Clearance

Read the devlog

The demo

Be first to play it

There isn’t a demo yet. When there is, this lot get it first - before itch, before Steam, before anywhere.

One email, roughly monthly, and only when there’s something actually worth your time. No countdowns. No “exciting news”. Reply to any of them and it comes straight to me - I read every one, because there’s only me to read them. And your address doesn’t go anywhere near anybody else, ever, for any money.

Who’s making this

It’s just me - and you’re very welcome

I’m James, and I’m one person building Second Chance in Unreal Engine 5 around a day job and a university degree, on a machine with an 8 GB graphics card. That last bit is a deliberate constraint: if it runs on mine, it runs on yours.

Oakhaven is invented, but it is invented out of a real place. The brick, the road markings, the bus stops, the chip shop, the way the light goes at four in the afternoon in November - all of it has been looked at properly and built on purpose, most of it off photographs taken round the corner from where I live. If you have lived somewhere like Radworth you will know within about ten seconds whether I have got it right.

Everything gets shown as it is built, warts and all, on the YouTube channel and in the devlog - broken animations, buildings hovering a foot off the ground, the lot. And if I have got a detail wrong, please tell me. Somebody saying “that’s not how the bins work round our way” is genuinely the most useful thing I get sent.

More about me, and how this actually gets made

Questions

The obvious ones

What is Second Chance?

A first-person British open-world life sim set in Oakhaven, a Midlands town I made up. There’s a neighbourhood called Radworth - 8.1 km² of Victorian terraces, a ring road, a river with bridges and a council estate - and the people who live in it. You come out of prison on a release programme, get put out at 6 Radworth Road with an empty house and an empty pocket, and decide what to do about that: get a proper job, go back to what you know, or try a bit of both. Other games in this corner hand you a loop. This one hands you a town, and the loop happens inside it.

I love free roam in the big open-world games, but I could live without the shooting and the story missions. Is this for me?

Yes. That is more or less exactly who I am building it for, and it is the reason it looks the way it does.

The thing people say they love about a big open world is usually the world - driving about, stopping in somewhere, finding a bit of town they had walked past twenty times. The thing they get handed is a mission list. Second Chance keeps the first part. There is a premise - you are out on licence and you may not leave the area - and after that the town is simply open. Take a job or leave it. Sit in the pub. Put a pound in the fruit machine. Take a rod down to the river. Go down the well and see what is under the fields. The clock carries on either way.

On the rough stuff: there are no guns in this game, and the trouble you can get into is the kind you can talk your way out of, run away from, or go home and sleep off. The stake is your licence, your money and your reputation rather than a body count - which is a genuinely different game, and the one I find far more interesting to build. If you want the open world and the daft British detail, and you would rather keep the peace while you are in it, you are the person I have in mind.

So do I have to go straight, or not?

Entirely up to you, and you can change your mind whenever you like. The honest route starts at Bestholme Job Centre, where Denise puts you through an assessment and the vacancies she offers depend on how you do: the bins, the fly-tipping round, the graffiti, the pub, deliveries on the e-bike. Stick at it and it will keep going, up through running the round and on into local politics.

The other route starts in the cellar at number 6 and will run just as far. Most people will try to run both at once and see how long the counting stays casual - which is the version I find most interesting.

Is this the British GTA?

That’s the question I asked in a video and it turned out to be the one everybody wanted to talk about, so here’s the straight answer: it is its own thing, and I’d be daft to claim otherwise. That is the most expensive game ever made and this is one bloke, one graphics card and eight square kilometres. Second Chance is an independent game with no affiliation to Rockstar Games whatsoever. If you want the two side by side, that’s further up the page.

What it is is the British version those games have never fancied making. Skip the mansion, the speedboat, the crew and the montage. You get a council house with an echo in it, a licence you are on, a job centre appointment you have to keep, and a fry-up you can afford on Thursday and are thinking twice about on Friday. The fantasy here is getting through the week and staying out - and the comedy writes itself, because it is drawn from a real place, right down to the wheelie bins, the pub carpet and the streetlamps going half-dim at ten to save the council a few quid.

If the big one is the American dream at full volume, this is a Tuesday in the Midlands with the heating off, and a chip shop called Chish & Fips.

Are there guns?

No, and there is a reason beyond squeamishness: this is England. Firearms here mean armed response or somebody’s shotgun on a farm, and neither is a thing a man on licence carries about a council estate.

Trouble in Oakhaven is the British kind - somebody squaring up outside a pub at closing. Fighting is planned: fists, whatever is to hand, and the good sense to walk away. It goes in once the everyday interactions are right, because that is the part everything else rests on. Either way, failure here costs you money, embarrassment or your licence, which is a far more interesting thing to lose than a life.

I’m photosensitive. Is it safe for me?

I can’t promise you it is, because it is yet to be tested for that by anyone qualified, and I would rather say so than imply otherwise. What I can tell you is what has been done: the whole town was measured for z-fighting - the flicker you get when two surfaces argue about which one is in front - and every building found guilty of it has been rebuilt. The terraces, the pub, all twenty-nine amenity buildings and five standalone kits are done; the sweep across the smaller kits is still going. An options screen for flashing effects, camera shake and motion is planned and isn’t built yet. If you watch a devlog video and something reads wrong, tell me the timestamp - that’s how the terraces got caught.

When’s it out?

No date. I’m one person and anybody who gives you a date this early is lying to you or to themselves. Join the list and you’ll know the day I do.

What’ll it cost?

Not decided yet. What I can promise now: one price, paid once. It arrives finished, it stays finished, and the only money that changes hands is the money you paid for it - no subscription, no season pass, and a shop you cannot buy anything from with real money, because there isn’t one.

What will I need to run it?

I don’t have verified minimum specs yet, and anyone quoting exact numbers before optimisation is guessing. What I can tell you is what I build it on: a Windows PC with 8 GB of video memory. That ceiling is a deliberate constraint I’m holding the whole project to, precisely so it runs on normal machines. Windows PC at launch. Proper specs go up here as soon as they’re real.

Is there a demo?

Not yet. It’s the next big thing after the current work, and it goes to this list first.

What’s the age rating?

It’s made for adults. It’s got strong language, drinking, gambling, sexual references, drug references and a general atmosphere of people doing things that would get them a caution. There’s no PEGI number on it yet - a rating gets issued when a game goes on sale, and it’ll be on this page the day it does. Until then: treat it as 18+, and don’t put it in front of a fourteen-year-old.

What happens to my email address?

It sits in a database I control, encrypted - so even a stolen copy of that database is a list of ciphertext rather than a list of people. It’s used for exactly one thing: telling you about Second Chance. It isn’t sold, rented, swapped or handed to advertisers. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe that works immediately without asking you to log into anything, and it takes you off my list, not some marketing company’s. The privacy notice names me, names the one company that helps me send the mail, and says exactly how long everything is kept.

I’ve found a bug, or I want to tell you something.

Please do. The game itself will have a report button that sends me the details directly. Failing that, email me - the more specific the better. “It crashed” is a start; “it crashed when I got out of the truck at the incinerator” is a fix. I read all of it myself, because there’s only me.

Still here? Go on then - come and be one of the first.

Join the list