Night Audit

22:00. The day shift hands you a five-star hotel. You have until six.

Night Audit is a co-operative horror game about doing a job properly while a building refuses to co-operate. You are night porters. Guests arrive and want their keys. Somebody has been sick on the third floor. The lift is stuck, a smoke alarm is chirping somewhere you cannot place, and a man in a hallway has not moved in ten minutes.

None of it is a puzzle. All of it is work, and the hotel is fifty-four rooms across three floors with a basement that has no lights in it.

THE JOB

Answer the bell. Check guests into the right rooms — the ledger says which, and the board behind the desk only has four hooks. Mop what needs mopping and empty the bucket before it stops working. Carry the luggage up. Fix the air conditioning. Find which of fifty-four smoke alarms is going off, by standing still in a corridor and waiting for the next chirp.

THE HOTEL

Twenty-six kinds of incident, dealt into a different hand every night, so no two shifts are made of the same things. Some are a blocked toilet. Some are a radio playing a signal from an empty room, which gets louder as you carry it toward the right door. Some are a copy of one of your colleagues, standing between the stairs and the lift, that only moves while you are looking at it.

And there is a fourth floor. The lift will take you, if you have the master key and the nerve. It is not upstairs.

THE RATING

Five stars on the wall behind the desk, and they go out one at a time where everybody can see them. At six in the morning a machine prints a receipt for the night — every point you lost, what it was called, and who did what. Somebody gets an award for it. Somebody usually deserves worse.

ONE TO FOUR

Solo is a long walk and a quiet building. Four is a corridor full of people shouting about a bell. Both are the game; the night is paced for whoever turns up.

There is also an emote wheel, an axe, and two things you can do that have no effect on anything whatsoever.