A SINGLE-PLAYER ANALOG HORROR GAME · IN DEVELOPMENT
CORE DAMAGE
The alarm is sounding. The plant is evacuated.
You are the only person still inside.
No computers. No network. No help arriving. A building full of gauges, valves, breakers and paper — and a clock that nobody set, because it is only physics.
01 — THE PREMISE
You already did the right thing.
It was never going to be enough.
Scramming a reactor stops the chain reaction in seconds. Every control rod drops. The machine is, in the strict sense, shut down.
It also keeps producing heat — six percent of full power the instant the rods land, and still tens of megawatts an hour later. That heat has to go somewhere. If it stops being removed, the water boils away and the fuel melts, with every rod exactly where it should be.
There is no monster in this building. There is a machine behaving precisely as physics requires, and one person who has to keep up with it.
02 — WHY IT MATTERS
Decay heat after shutdown
Thermal output of a 3,000 MW reactor from the moment it is scrammed. This is the same curve the game simulates — the Way–Wigner correlation, plotted on a logarithmic time axis.
View as table
| Time after trip | Fraction of full power | Thermal output |
|---|
03 — THE INSTRUMENTS
Everything you know, you read off a dial.
Some of them are lying.
Gauges have their own power supply, their own failure modes, and their own ways of being wrong. One can freeze at the last reading that was true. One can show the signal sent to a valve rather than the position of the valve itself — which is exactly what happened at Three Mile Island, for two hours, while the crew reasoned correctly from an instrument that was not.
04 — WHAT YOU DO
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i
Diagnose, don't fight
A pump is dead. Is the breaker open, is the bearing seized, or did somebody close a valve three rooms away last Tuesday? One plant, one simulation, and faults that cross from electrical to mechanical to plumbing without anything scripting them.
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ii
The clock is not set by anyone
There is no scripted countdown. Time to core damage is computed from the state of the plant, every tick. Get one pump running and you can watch the slope change on the chart recorder. Correct actions visibly buy time.
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iii
Listen to the building
Every running machine makes noise and every dead one makes silence. You learn to walk into a room and know from the sound that the pump has stopped. A room that should hum and doesn't is the worst room in the plant.
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iv
Losing is not a screen
If the clock runs out, the core melts and you keep playing — deafened, in the dark, in a building that is now actively hostile. The goal quietly changes from prevent to contain. Nobody tells you it changed.
05 — STAY IN THE LOOP
It ships when it's good.
Solo-developed. No launch date, no pre-orders, nothing to buy. Leave an address and you'll hear when there is something real to show — and not before.