The Human Exploit: After Hours

It is two in the morning and the help board is yours. Calls and alerts arrive all night, and most of the people on the line are exactly who they say they are. One voice is not. It borrows a different name each night, it never threatens, and it always brings a deadline.

Vantry is a fictional city you see through one window and a phone line. You never leave the night desk: a terminal, a phone, a notebook of saved numbers, a shift clock, a case board and a kettle. Five regulars call through the game: Ines, a night nurse; Bram at the Water Works; Mrs Pell in Old Town; Rafi, a night courier; and Noor, a student. Wren, the day-shift lead, arrives at six, and the board's absent owner leaves you a note each night.

Each request arrives with a name, what it wants and often a deadline. Ask a question, pull a badge record, trace a receipt or call back on an entry in your notebook, then grant it, refuse it or hold it for the morning. The shift clock runs from midnight to six and moves only when you act, never while you read or think, but every check costs shift minutes and real people are waiting. Each night adds one new desk tool, from the phone line to badge records, a power grid on a storm night and a trail of receipts.

At the heart of the game is the books' last instruction: pause, and call back on a number you already had. A number the caller offers proves nothing. Urgency, authority and familiarity glow on every caller as strings you can count, but strings are pressure, not proof, and honest callers can share the voice's habits by coincidence. A tell can make you suspicious; only a check decides. Every time you catch the voice, its mask and one tell go up on your case board.

The first release has ten nights, one for each book in the series, at 25 to 40 minutes a night and five to six hours in all, with three endings. Night 1 is a short tutorial that cannot be lost. There is no game over, no countdown and no high score: each night closes with a morning log of one plain sentence per person, and the story carries your results forward.

You come back for the next night's tool, the regulars' stories and the case you are building. Trust rises and falls: help a regular and they share a private phrase; turn them away and they call less, and can stop calling. Each night also adds a 45-second game to the break-room arcade cabinet, and after the last night the Archive lets you replay any night from its start.

Based on The Human Exploit, ten books about cybercrime and the people it touches. The series' website already hosts ten untimed puzzle rooms on an after-hours bulletin board; each becomes one night here, with its tool, its opening line and its chip-music theme, in the books' look of black obsidian cracked with ember light. The game stays on the defender's side and in fiction: you only ever receive, check and decide, nobody breaks into anything, every tool is a metaphor, and every person and place is fictional.

The Human Exploit: After Hours is a complete game design for PC. Development has not started. A phone version may follow.