The world of EPW is an interstellar map divided by music branches. There are five main solar systems representing five branches of electronic music; each planet is a specific genre within that branch. The five main branches are broken down here and each solar system has an average of five genres (five main planets) from their respective branch. The space between planets (Dub), as well as in-game cyberspace (Chiptune), are playable areas. More genres and branches will become available as the EPW universe expands. The aggressiveness of the genre and intensity of the tracks dictate the difficulty of the particular areas of the universe or particular maps. Boss battles and sieges are orchestrated to the beat and melodic progression of specific tracks that play during those battles and sieges.

EPW has a cyberpunk narrative; Snuff takes place several hundred years into the future and is focused on the kinds of decisions made when interstellar expansionism is the predominant economic driving force behind the whole of humanity. The frictionless transaction of value is required for a space-faring civilization like this, as is the frictionless transfer of power, which is why the society of distant humanity in EPW uses arbitrarily interchangeable digital currencies and decentralized crypto-governments. This makes the dynamic mechanic of territory and property ownership unique in EPW.

Snuff is highly social. Some battle mechanics require group consensus or attentative voting within a group in order for certain actions to take place; this makes playing with others polemic and quickly establishes who is competent and who is not. The currency used in-game is an ERC20 token (a form of cryptocurrency) which can be traded freely and used to track assets outside the game as well. Being good at playing the game will mean being rewarded with real money that can be arbitrarily interchanged with any other currency or product in your actual life.

Because people do not all speak the same language in real life, this is mirrored in the EPW universe. Your race and blood type dictate your ethnic group in the game, which dictates which base languages your character speaks. Characters speaking other languages will have their text remain ciphered in the Shadowbox chat system until your character levels up their language skill to be able to decipher the cryptographic systems that obfuscate meaning in the EPW universe. As worded, language and cryptography in the EPW universe are intimately related and this is why the Sniph cipher is used for all communications in the game.

There is a unique combination of combat mechanics in the EPW universe, as class choice dictates game-genre and playstyle. A pilot, for example, plays the game as one would any racing game, but a soldier plays the game as a first-person shooter. Having many game-genres present in a single engine makes gameplay highly dynamic and difficult to exhaust. Most of the game-genres present in the expanded EPW universe are not present in EPW 1 due to EPW 1 being a table-top game. Snuff will eventually contain music-game, puzzle-game, RTS, and RPG mechanics depending on your class choice.

There is a leveling system in EPW based on amount of time spent playing certain parts of the game, but it is only used in relation to skill and stat points, neither of which are publicly showcased. Rank is publicly showcased and is not based on amount of time played but rather on proficiency of what was played. Further, it is relative to all other players. For example, if you are in the top 1% of players with regards to shot-accuracy, then your accuracy rank will be 1. If you are a racer and your average lap-times are in the 25th percentile of players, then your racing rank will be 25. All skill ranks are averaged out to give your overall ranking. Having ranks be based on player-relative percentiles makes public status fair and earned rather than being bought or no-lifed like in all other MMOs to date.