Broken Contract

READ BEFORE SIGNING.

You are a Unit: a company robot with a piece of a human soul inside it. The Company sends your crew to sites nobody should enter at night: a dead steelworks, an office floor on lockdown, a lighthouse island that the tide cuts off. Your job is to carry valuables to the truck and get home before the shift ends.

Before every shift each employee is offered three contracts and signs one in private. It might make you rich. It might need a colleague left behind. You won’t see anyone else’s until the Chaos Report at the end of the shift. Then every contract is declassified and the game shows you the Moment of Betrayal.

You are a machine, and you are also a person.
Your chassis has health: hits ring, servos fail, sparks fly, you power down and can be rebooted. The soul inside it has sanity. Stay near the things that hunt you and the machine takes over for a few seconds, with static and codes where your thoughts should be. In your head you hear whispers, heartbeats and knocks that nobody else hears.

Every site has a different horror and its own rules.

• A steelworks with scheduled steam purges, and something that stops, listens and learns your tricks.

• A research annex with a cheerful cube that answers questions, a custodian that tidies mess, and what is in it.

• An office floor where the lights only wake for movement, and a New Hire who has taken the name tag and the face of a colleague who is somewhere else. Count your crew.

• A lighthouse island reached by a causeway that the sea takes back, and a bridge sign reading MAX 2 PERSONS.

• Hearthside, a quiet family street at night, where the houses are warm, the lights are on, and the things inside have been waiting for company.

The sites are generated every shift and sized to your crew, so a solo run and a crew of eight both fit. More locations are on the way.

Work together. Or don’t.

• Carry heavy cargo together, revive colleagues, share a pooled wage, or play At-Will, where every unit is on its own.

• Proximity voice chat: the things in the dark can hear you, and one of them can copy you.

• Three modes (Standard Contract, Union Contract, At-Will Employment) and four difficulty levels, from Probation to Expendable, where a full wipe ends the file for good.

• Professions, a Company Store, reputation, and a depot lounge between shifts.

The history is never told whole. Fragments are scattered through the sites. You write the rest.