Adverse Action

THE MODEL DOES NOT PRODUCE REASONS.

SECTION 61 DOES.

Adverse Action is a paperwork thriller from QuietMachines (solo developer). A scoring model decides who in the city of Newmark gets credit, housing, insurance, a utility connection. It does not explain itself, but the law says every denial must carry a signed Statement of Reasons, prepared by a person.

That person is you. Desk 9, Reasons Section.

RECONSTRUCT. Each case arrives as continuous-feed printout: the subject's file, the source records, and a stub reading DENIED. No explanation. Cross-reference the sources, work out which fact the model acted on, and cite the exact lines that prove it.

COMPOSE. Select the reason code and attach your evidence. Wrong reasons come back as appeals — and appeals cost you shift time and go on your record.

SIGN, OR REFUSE. If the reason is there, sign it, in your name. If the reason is monstrous, it is still true, signing it is the game. And when there is no reason at all in the file, you can fabricate one that will probably survive appeal, or refuse to sign and eat the time. It costs you either way.

The model gets retrained. Your hard-won heuristics quietly stop working. And the deeper you get, the more the denials start to make a shape the paperwork never names.

• A bureaucracy game of pure deduction: no combat, no meters, just documents, a clock, and your signature

• Every case hand-written; a document inspection game where the answers are hidden, not checked

• Rendered entirely as dot-matrix printout on greenbar paper, a dot matrix game with not one generated pixel

• 5–6 hours to your first ending; multiple endings; your final performance review is built from how you actually played

• Entirely hand-made: every word, portrait, and sound in this game was written, drawn, or recorded by a person. No generative AI anywhere in the pipeline.

The Section thanks you for its accuracy.