THROWAWAY

Five night shifts. Five threads. One forum.

It's 3 AM and you can't sleep. You find a forum full of night-shift stories, each one posted from a throwaway account. Every author stopped posting at the same time: 3:17 AM.

Open a thread and you work that shift yourself, night after night, until it ends one way or another. Between shifts you're back in your room, at your laptop, where the comments start to notice what you did.

The threads

• The takeout. Deliver orders across a sleeping town. The same man is in every window.
  
• The motel. Run the night desk on Route 9. The last clerk left a list of rules. The motel has eight rooms, so why does line 9 keep lighting up?
  
• The diner. He comes in at 3:17 and sits at the counter. Every night something in the diner is different. Notice it, or he moves one stool closer.
  
• The forest. Volunteer search and rescue. Follow a missing hiker's radio through the trees. If you find stairs in the woods, do not approach them.
  
• The station. The night desk at a small-town police station. The lost & found is full of polaroids. All of them are of you.

Features

• Five original horror stories, each with its own way to play: spot what has changed, keep to the rules, follow a voice through static, find where a photo was taken from.
  
• Every shift can end more than one way.
  
• A forum that remembers: replies and messages that react to what you did, and what you didn't.
  
• A low-poly PS1 look with VHS grain, with options for softer effects.
  
• Full controller support.
  
• 14 languages.

A note before you start

THROWAWAY can use your computer's user name in a couple of places in the story. You can turn this off in the settings.