Hot Seat Triage

Hot Seat Triage is an arcade triage game about the cognitive traps of real emergency rooms. The waiting room is full, the information is thin, and every patient has a fading aura: their own clock to decompensation.

Pick a patient. Spend questions from a shift budget that is never quite enough. Then make the call: NOW, SOON or LATER.

Each of the 498 hand-written cases is built around one named cognitive bias: anchoring, availability, premature closure, presentation and stereotype bias. The heartburn that is not heartburn. The back pain that "just needs ibuprofen". Fall for it, and the Clinical Notebook shows you what the trap was, what you missed, and what you never asked.

Every case is written and clinically reviewed by a practicing emergency physician and medical educator, grounded in the clinical decision-making literature (Croskerry, Graber, Tversky & Kahneman). Every case is also a claim about medicine, and a claim can be wrong: any patient can be flagged from the notebook with its case number attached, and those reports go straight to the person who writes the cases.

Patients you send to SOON or LATER do not disappear. They stay in the room on their own clock, they can deteriorate, and some will need a second look. Radio calls bring ambulances: accept, and their notes turn into extra questions while the clock runs faster. Mutators such as Night Surge and Understaffed change the pace again.

• Campaign: five residency shifts with rising pressure, then Rotation, a repeatable shift built from the traps that catch you most.

• Arcade: Easy, Medium or Hard, with five unlockable mutators that raise the stakes and the score.

• Daily Shift: one seeded shift per day, the same patients for everyone, one attempt, a live global rank and a shareable report card.

• Bias Profile: see which of six bias families catch you, with MASTERED and FOCUS AREA markers and a short clinical codex for each: the heuristic, why it kills, how to counter it.

• Career: earn XP in every mode and climb six ranks, from Intern to Chief of Emergency.

• Leaderboards and achievements: 8 leaderboards with local, global and friends views, and 20 Steam achievements.

• No medical degree required. You learn to read vital signs and red flags as you play, and How to Play shows every mechanic in short gameplay clips. The game does speak a clinician's language; a simplified, non-clinical mode is planned for 1.0.

• A real test for professionals. Cases are designed to exploit expert shortcuts, pattern recognition and muscle memory.

The core loop is content complete and stable. Early Access is for balancing the waiting room against real play data, growing the case bank from 498 toward roughly 600 cases, building the simplified mode and adding languages. Everything added before and at 1.0 is free for Early Access owners. The full plan is in the Early Access section of this page.

• English and Turkish: interface and every case text

• Mouse, keyboard and full gamepad support

• Steam Cloud saves; scores and achievements earned offline sync when you reconnect

• Urgency is shown by the shape and intensity of the aura, not by colour alone

• Windows at Early Access launch; macOS and Linux will be listed once properly tested

• Optional, anonymous gameplay statistics, off unless you agree