ANOMIA: Listening Post K-7

Somewhere north. Listening Post K-7.

1977. You were flown in hooded. You don't know where you are, only what the post is called and what Control expects of you: find the signals, log the signals, keep the stove lit, and stay indoors.

ANOMIA is a one-room, first-person horror game about listening. You are the replacement operator of a three-metre hut on the ice, alone with a radar scope, an antenna you turn by hand, a reel-to-reel deck and a teletype that only ever speaks to you in capitals. The last operator, Varga, left before relief arrived. Varga also left tapes.

THE WORK

Every shift, Control sends a quota. Out on the scope, the contacts drift in from the dark: whistlers off the aurora, pulsars, telemetry chirps, code. Some of them sound like a choir that has forgotten the song.

• Find the blip. The radar sweep gives you a bearing.

• Turn to it. Crank the antenna until the scope locks.

• Record it. Hold steady on the reel-to-reel while the tape runs.

• Clean it. Flip the filter switches until the noise falls away and the signal comes through.

• File it. Natural, man-made or unknown. Control likes unknown. Control never asks about unknown.

It's simple. It's meant to be. The hard part is everything else.

THE HUT

The generator needs pumping. The fuses blow. The antenna ices over, and you'll see it turning white if you climb onto the bunk and look out through the slot window, out across the snow toward the mountains you can sometimes make out, toward the other hut you're sure nobody lives in. The stove needs coal. The coffee machine works, mostly.

And at night the radar shows something pale, going round and round the post, a little closer each time.

THE RULES

Nobody gives you the rules. Varga does, eventually, one tape at a time, hidden wherever Control won't think to look. You'll learn them the way Varga did.

Don't open the door. Whatever it sounds like.

THE WORDS

Something out there is getting into the language. As the nights go on, the labels on your console start to slip. The teletype loses its nouns. Varga's tapes stop being able to say what things are called. You will have to learn the hut with your hands, by colour and by position, because by the end that's all you'll have.

FEATURES

• A tense, self-contained horror story of roughly two hours, told across ten shifts and ten nights

• A tactile signal-hunting loop inspired by Voices of the Void, pared back so the dread does the work

• A single, cramped, fully interactive hut: antenna, scope, reel-to-reel, teletype, fuse panel, stove, generator pump, armoured shutters, a wheel lock on the door

• Unseen horror built from sound: knocking, footsteps in the snow, voices at the door that sound like someone you know

• Language decay as a mechanic: what you can read gets worse, and the finale is played almost without words

• Hidden tapes, notes and photographs that tell the story only if you go looking

• Low-resolution, dithered 3D in the spirit of late-90s horror, with a fully mastered, headphone-first soundscape

• Full controller support, subtitles, adjustable comfort options and a reduced-flicker mode

A NOTE ON PLAYING

Play in the dark. Wear headphones. Write things down.

The operator listens. The operator does not answer.