Severed Signal

In development — no date yet

Habitation Block 17

Nine apartments. Five days. A resident register that burned, and nobody left who will tell you the truth.

Vostrenia, 1983. You have been made custodian of a building whose paperwork no longer matches the people inside it. The auditor comes on Friday.

Join the dispatch Steam page — soon

For players of Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Roottrees are Dead and The Séance of Blake Manor.

Habitation Block 17 at night: a concrete apartment block with nine numbered windows in a three by three grid, a lobby at street level and a cutaway basement archive below. A severed antenna sparks on the roof.

The briefing

You have been given the keys and nothing else.

Custodian Vlašim walked out of Block 17 on the night the records archive caught fire, and has not been seen since. The Ministry of Housing has recorded him as presumed deceased and moved on. You have his keys, his office, his unfinished tea, and his job.

What you do not have is the register. Two hundred pages of it went up in the basement, along with the tenancy cards, the ration allocations and the work assignments. The Ministry keeps a copy, of course. The Ministry's copy was last reconciled in 1974.

On Friday an auditor arrives to check the building against its file. Every door needs a name, every name needs an occupation, and every line needs to be right. Get it wrong and the discrepancies do not land on you — they land on whoever is behind the door.

How it plays

Three things, over and over, for five days

Walk the block

Nine apartments, a lobby, a basement. You can knock, and you can let yourself in when nobody answers. Everything is evidence: a name inked on a ration book, boots by a door in a size that does not match the man who owns them, a letter written to somebody who is not supposed to live here.

Fill the register

Every resident needs a name, a door, and an occupation. The register is the whole interface — there is no notebook to keep separately and no second screen. What you write down is what the Ministry believes.

Submit the page

The Ministry countersigns a page only when every line on it is correct. It will not tell you which line was wrong. Guessing is possible; guessing is also how a family ends up reassigned to a district they have never seen.

Try a page

Ground floor, three doors

A real extract from the first day, small enough to solve in a minute. The rule is the game's rule: the page comes back countersigned only if all three lines are right, and you are not told which one let you down.

Form R-9 — Resident Register

Block 17 · Ground floor · 3 of 9 doors

Custodian's notes

  1. Three names are assigned to this floor. M. Berzins is a seamstress at the garment combine. A. Nowak keeps nights at the rail depot. T. Havel is a clerk with the Housing Ministry.
  2. Only one apartment on this floor shares a wall with the stairwell: 02. Stand in the lobby after seven and you can hear a treadle sewing machine through it.
  3. 01 takes the full morning sun. The other two face the courtyard and get none of it.
  4. Whoever has 01 has kept blackout paper up since May, and sleeps through the daylight.

Assign each door

01
02
03

Stuck? The reasoning

Nowak works nights, so he sleeps by day, so he is the one who needs blackout paper — and note 4 puts the blackout paper in 01. The treadle machine through the stairwell wall is Berzins the seamstress, and note 2 puts the stairwell wall on 02. Havel takes what is left.

The shape of it

What you are getting

The building
Nine apartments, a lobby and a basement archive. One block, modelled in full, no loading between any of it.
The clock
Five in-game days. The auditor arrives on the fifth whether the register is finished or not.
The interface
The register, and nothing else. No combat, no chase, no inventory tetris.
Failure
You cannot lose. You can file a register that is wrong, submit it, and live with what that does to the people in it.
Rendering
PlayStation-era on purpose: low resolution, ordered dithering, affine texture warping, vertices that will not sit still.
Platform
PC first. Anything after that depends on how the first one goes.

Questions

Reasonable things to ask

When is it out?
There is no date. It is being made by a small studio, and we would rather say nothing than name a year we miss. The dispatch hears first.
Is there a demo?
Not yet. There will be, and the dispatch gets it before anyone else.
Is it horror?
No. It is tense, and it is sad in a few places, but nothing in this building is going to chase you.
How long is it?
Built for one long evening or three short ones.
Do I need to take notes?
No — the register does the bookkeeping. People bring a pen anyway. We are not going to stop you.
Will there be a Steam page?
Yes. The morning it goes up, this page changes and the dispatch goes out.
Is Vostrenia a real place?
No. It is invented, and deliberately not a stand-in for any one country.