An evacuated PSX-era apartment block, a clicking dosimeter and a lead drum. Somewhere on every floor, something ordinary is radioactive.
Contain every contaminated item in the lead drum, then ride the elevator up to a bigger, darker floor
Somebody left the job half done, and pools of the stuff have gone down on the floors - they sit there in the dark, and the lift will not take you up while any of them are still wet, so a floor is not finished when the manifest is empty, and sometimes somebody left their bucket standing beside one
A sponge on a handle is the third thing you sign for in the lobby, taking a hand like the meter and the torch
Every run starts on the ground floor of Block 9, a pillared entrance hall running from the doors to the lift, with the porter's office walled off down one side behind its own doorway and the stairwell standing open off the other, with a front door that leads back out to the main menu, moonlight through the front windows, benches, abandoned luggage, a knocked-over chair, mailboxes, a district map, the porter's post and a pallet of supplies, with the liquidation crew's stores set down by the drum and cases still lying where somebody put them down by the doors
Scuffed enamel plates along both walls of the hall - scratched, streaked and grimed at the edges, and lit and broken up by the picture like the wall behind them - cover the kit, listening, probing, containment, salvage and the flashlight with your own button prompts, beside a torn paper evacuation order from the housing office and a yellow maintenance plate closing the stairwell, and a large procedure board in a batten frame beside the archway sums up the job in six steps
Every floor, the lobby included, has a real concrete stairwell behind an open door off the corridor, with switchback flights climbing and descending through a shaft several storeys tall, a closed door on every landing and dim wall lamps, one flickering
Clicks follow the inverse-square sum of every live source, and walls weaken radiation that passes through them
Every click is a real Eberline E-120 recording fired as a random detection event, from silence with no radiation to sparse ticks far away, rapid clicking up close and a dense rattle on top of a source, easing up and down as you move
Hold RMB to raise the meter and read only the narrow cone in front of you
Exposure builds up across floors and the run ends at 100%, and past halfway the meter never reads zero again because you are the nearest source it can find - high enough and your own count drowns the faint ones unless you probe for them - with the meter calling out each quarter you pass on the way there
No two contaminated things sound quite alike through the dosimeter - most read as a steady rise, some are tight and fierce and only give themselves away in the last stride, some spread a weak reading across half a room, one now and then comes in slow surges with long quiet gaps between them, and rarely one is fading while you work, weaker on the way out than it was on the way in
A source lying under floor litter reads faint and flat until the pile is disturbed - wade into it, shove it about or knock it with something thrown, and the count jumps to what it should have been all along
Very rarely something ordinary lying on a floor is worth an absurd amount at the crate - a previous liquidator's meter, a painting nobody came back for - and nothing marks it out but the figure in the corner of your eye
Batteries come part used, a quarter to a full charge, and the pickup says which you found
Once in a while the building's room tone drops away entirely for a few seconds, leaving the clicks, your own footsteps and one distant machine, and then comes back
Rarely a wall carries a cat sticker with a couple of emptied tins and a keepsake left on the floor beneath it, and the handwritten notes elsewhere in the block sometimes mention it
The scrawls left by earlier crews contradict each other, correct each other and trail off, and no two of them are reading the same building
Contamination on a floor often follows a story - carried out of one flat and dropped along the corridor, left in the kitchens after a meal, blown in on one side of the building, or put away in cupboards and storerooms - and a resident's note sometimes says what they saw, though they are not always right, and on the higher floors half of it is buried in the litter whatever the story
Grain, specks and tear lines rise with nearby radiation and total dose, easing off for the source in your hands so you can still see your way to the drum, and the specks and tears sit on the same virtual pixel grid as the picture behind them
Pick up, drop and throw physics props, and throw the contaminated ones into the drum
An old canvas rucksack leans against a pillar in the lobby and is part of the kit you sign for, so the lift will not leave the lobby without it on your back
The dosimeter, the flashlight and whatever you are carrying each take a hand and only one is out at a time, swapped with the scroll wheel or 1, 2 and 3
A cupboard you have been through is still open, and still emptied onto the floor, when you come back down to that floor later in the shift
Wardrobes, display cabinets and bedside tables can be opened, and about half of them have something shut inside - pills, a notebook, matches, keys, a photograph, a spare flashlight - which spills out onto the floor at your feet when you pull them open
A contaminated item is occasionally sitting inside one of them, and the dosimeter reads it through the door at about a third of its strength, so a reading that will not resolve into anything on the floor is worth opening the furniture for
Now and then a contaminated item weeps while you carry it, dripping small spills behind you that come faster the longer you hold on - each one reads on the dosimeter, holds the lift like any other spill and is still there when you come back down, so the choice is a run for the drum or putting it down and mopping up the trail
Right up against a strong enough source the dosimeter chokes - the clicks thin out instead of rattling harder, so the loudest spot is not always where the thing is, and backing off and circling it tells you more than standing on it
Past the eighth floor sources come fiercer, patchier and more often in slow surges, and a floor more often carries a second condition
Something glass or china that is contaminated can break if you throw it hard into a wall or the floor, leaving two weaker pieces where there was one, and the manifest counts both
A spill nobody has touched slowly creeps outward over the minutes you leave it, and a wider pool takes longer to scrub
Now and then a crew store holds a lead-lined carry case, and once you have it whatever you carry goes in it, halving what a contaminated item doses you on the way to the drum
A floor with the power out sometimes has a breaker cabinet in the far half of the corridor, and priming its relay from your flashlight cell brings the corridor lamps back - not all of them steadily
Now and then a front door is locked and its key is somewhere else on the floor, usually shut in a cupboard in another flat
Very rarely the lift stops between floors, the car goes dark for a few seconds with your dose still climbing, and then it carries on
The corridor PA sometimes crackles out a housing office announcement for your floor, dated and not quite right
A framed photograph sometimes turns up on a floor, and looking at it shows another room on that floor the way it was left
Containing a strong item leaves a faint, wide warmth where it sat, which fades away over the next minute or so
Heavy furniture between you and a contaminated item takes the edge off its reading, far less than a wall does, and two pieces in a row take off more
A pool reads hotter as it spreads and cooler as you scrub it, and the patch where it was stays faintly warm for a minute after it is gone
The low-resolution picture always uses whole screen pixels per virtual pixel, so every block is the same size at 1080p, 1440p, ultrawide and 4K instead of rows alternating between two heights
A save, stats or options file that cannot be read is set aside beside the original as a .bad copy and the game opens normally instead of failing at the menu
A half-scrubbed spill is still half-scrubbed when you come back down to its floor or continue a saved shift
Something thrown hard at a shut door pushes it part of the way open, away from you
A closed door takes a little off what reaches you from the room behind it, so shutting a room you have not cleared yet makes working next door a little safer
After a while pressed up against something strong, the dosimeter takes a moment longer to settle back down
Plant floors turn up more flashlight cells, and treatment and shelter floors more first aid
An emergency shower and eyewash station by the lobby's front door rinses a quarter of your dose off for cash - pull the handle and the water comes down over the basin and splashes into a floor drain - and every wash costs more than the last
The main menu's Daily Shift builds the same floors for everyone on the same day, and the lobby greets you with the date it was built for
The dose readout says HIGH and CRITICAL in words and changes the pattern of its bar as well as its colour, so the warning reads without colour
Sometimes more than one thing in a scene somebody left behind is contaminated, and the loud one hides the quiet one - put the first in the drum and the meter drops but does not settle
Items and cash rest on the real tops of furniture and floors from the moment a floor loads, and furniture collides with its actual shape
The green-lit, outlined open barrel of sludge pulses while you carry something and rejects anything that is not radioactive
A throw that is nearly on target is drawn into the opening, one that clips the rim clanks and rolls in rather than bouncing away, and the crate's lid swings open for anything thrown its way
A battered oxblood-and-cream AVTOMAT kiosk stands in every corridor, its red readouts glowing and a warm light on the floor in front of it, and opens a machine front of lit shelves, a credit LCD and selector keys, and sells iodine pills that take 35% off your dose at a price that rises with every pack, and a fresh battery, a flare and a contamination scan that cost a little more on every floor you climb
The stats page keeps a second kind of record alongside the work - how many of the unusual floor types you have logged, how many cupboards you have been through, how many documents you have read and how many crew stores you have got into
The report a dead liquidator leaves behind opens with what exposed them most - the contaminated item and the room it was in, or that it was in their hands or their pack - says what they recovered from the block, and the floor's condition line is the one it was actually built with
One line in Options cycles PERIOD, SOFTENED and CLEAN, setting the picture switches together - full-strength period presentation, a softer pass with the static eased and the vignette off, or a clean modern picture - and every switch underneath can still be set by hand
One of the four consumables is 30% off on any given floor, decided by the floor itself, so the machine you walk past on the way in is worth a look every time
Four one-off fittings sit on the lower shelves of the AVTOMAT and stay with you for the rest of the shift - a lead apron that takes a quarter off every dose you take, a dynamo cell that makes the torch draw 40% less, a meter calibration that hears faint sources from further off but chokes into a slow count close to a strong one, and a directional probe that halves the probe cone so a sweep gives a much sharper bearing
Now and then a room has been left wrong - a chair pulled up to face a blank wall, a ring of chairs dragged into the middle of the floor facing each other, a single small thing set down in the dead centre of an empty floor, or a handful of identical ones laid out in a straight line
Occasionally a television is still playing, a chair pulled up in front of it, its screen rolling with static that flickers over the room while the set hisses
Most floors now carry one or two quieter traits on top of whatever else is true of them, and the condition line names the strongest one if nothing bigger has already claimed it
The offices floor hums under bare white fluorescent tubes that throw a warm, grubby yellow light in short pools across the paper and carpet, with every other tube a glowing dead fitting, while every other floor keeps its orange lamplight
A run of the floor several rooms wide can have no working lighting at all while the rest of it is lit normally, so the power distribution reads as damaged rather than simply dark
Some floors have been leaking for a long time - stains across most ceilings, standing wet patches well outside the bathrooms and kitchens, and drips you can hear from the next room
A floor can be freezing, with the fog closing right in and going blue, or so still that the building almost stops making noise - no knocks, no drips, no wind, just the lamp hum and the clicks
Occasionally a storey was given over to the sick - examination rooms and beds behind almost every door, stores between them, bright clinical lighting and very little left on the walls
Very rarely the block gave a whole storey up to technical work - concrete carried through from the corridor, plant and instruments among the beds, no windows, half the lights out and contamination half again as strong as anywhere else
Rarely a short run of corridor repeats itself exactly, the same thing against the same wall at the same spacing twice over, and then stops
Concrete floors sound lower and heavier than the flats, a treatment floor thinner and harder, so a floor is recognisable with your eyes shut
Very rarely one room of a flat runs a whole bay further back than the building has depth for, with no window in it and nothing to say so - the flat is simply bigger inside than the block it is in
Sometimes one room has had its floor replaced and the rest of the flat has not
Now and then a room is lit, quiet and completely clean - nothing in it is contaminated and the lamp is still working - which makes it somewhere to stop and sort yourself out without the game ever saying so
The service lift sometimes has a liquidator's badge and their meter in it as well as the cash, so the lift somebody left a source in turns out to have been found before
Once in a while one room of a flat has been redecorated and the rest has not, so the wallpaper stops at a doorway for no reason anybody left behind
Rarely a room has a high background of its own with nothing in it to find - the meter climbs as you walk in and keeps climbing, and the rise is broad and flat instead of sharpening to a point, which is the only thing telling you there is nothing there to carry out
Rarely the lift opens on a storey with no flats on it at all - bare concrete carried straight through from the corridor into every room, service doors on every opening, plant and switchgear where the furniture should be, industrial lamps, no windows, and the contamination sitting in among the equipment
Now and then a storey was given over to paperwork - aisles of shelving, boxes, a desk and a dead terminal in every other room, fluorescent tube lighting throughout, service doors and almost no daylight
Occasionally a storey was cleared and used to put people up - mattresses laid out along the walls of flat after flat, cases and supply crates between them, tins, plates and belongings left where they were set down
Every so often, high up, a floor turns out never to have been lived on - one wallpaper repeated flat after flat, every door standing open, every fluorescent still burning, no windows, a few packing boxes and nothing else, and the job to do in it all the same
Occasionally a room on a floor has been boarded shut from the corridor and used as a liquidation store - rip the planks off the door and there are fresh cells, flares, a first aid kit, a gold bar and a note from whoever was rationing them, and a keypad on the wall beside the door that nobody left the code for
The card on the lobby table is yours - your Steam name typed in capitals, your account number as the pass number, your avatar printed as a grainy sepia photograph with the office stamp pressed across its corner, your shift number, a hole punched for every floor on your record, and a clearance grade, assignment string and signature worked out from them, so it is the same card every shift and nobody else's looks like it. Sign for it before the lift will take you up
Old identity cards turn up beside abandoned kit and in the stores, and reading one holds the card itself up until you put it away - a photograph pasted in at the corners, a name, a department and a serial number, a signature and a housing office stamp pressed unevenly over the lot, on laminated Block 9 stock that catches the light and is not valid outside the zone - a housing office clerk, a lift fitter, somebody from the decontamination crew
The stash left behind is sometimes a previous liquidator's rather than a resident's, with their meter and their badge put down beside it and a note in their own words
Die on a floor and the next liquidator to reach that floor number finds your dosimeter and your card lying near the worst of it, and your pack too if it was worth carrying - taking it pays what was in it and says what exposed you
Now and then a floor holds what is left of another player who died there on their own shift - a skeleton on the floor beside the furniture they fell by, their dosimeter, their card with their name and liquidator number, and their pack if nobody has emptied it
A shift from the main menu that goes up after the liquidators who did not come back - the procedure board in the lobby becomes a recovery order listing who they were, the floor they are on, how long ago and whether their pack is still there, each of them is waiting on their floor, and taking their card tags them for collection and pays a small fee
Rarely a storeroom has been quietly emptied into by whoever was here last - a gold bar, a couple of valuables and a first aid kit gathered in one spot, under a handwritten note taped to a clear stretch of wall above the shelving
Once in a great while something is standing a long way off down a corridor, a thin dark shape at about your own height, and it is gone by the time you have covered the ground - it never follows, never touches you and never shows up on the meter
A distant knock in the building is sometimes answered by another one somewhere else a second or two later
Every so often the bell of a lift sounds on the floor above or below you
A door standing open a long way behind you occasionally swings to and slams
Even with the mains down, once in a while a set in one of the flats is still running a dead channel
A sticker turns up on a wall in one of the flats now and then, the same cat that watches the lobby
Once in a while, well up the block, the lift opens on offices, and they run on for twice the length of any floor in the block - beige carpet the whole way, yellowed wallpaper repeating flat after flat with ruled columns and frayed chevrons climbing every panel and mould along the top and the skirting, a white suspended tile ceiling overhead with the fluorescent tubes recessed into its grid, burning over every stretch of corridor, desks and chairs and filing shelves instead of beds, no windows at all, the same piece of furniture standing out in the corridor at every turn telling you nothing, and side passages opening off the run that go two rooms deep and stop at a blank wall. There is nothing contaminated on it and nothing to sweep, the room tone drops away to the hum of the tubes, and the lift will not answer once the doors close behind you - the corner of the screen drops the manifest and reads FIND A WAY OUT instead - the stairwell somebody boarded over is the way up, and you climb it
Bookcases and racks carry things on their shelves now, drawn from what the room itself would hold - crowded in an archive, sparse on a floor somebody stripped, bare in a flat nobody moved into - and what sits within reach can be sold or turn out contaminated like anything on the floor
Rarely a floor arrives with something spilled across the whole of it, the ceilings stained and far more pools than usual to scrub before the lift will go
One room on every floor was left in the middle of something - breakfast laid out with the chair pushed back, a meal half prepared, a workbench with the tools still out, a flat packed down to one bag, a maintenance call that never finished - sometimes with a note in somebody's handwriting, and everything in them is ordinary salvage you are free to take
Every stairwell door, the lobby's included, has a scuffed green and white stairway sign screwed up beside it - somebody climbing a flight, a handrail and the lettering - so you can find the shaft from down the corridor
Rarely a flat has a room that is somehow still kept - no litter on the floor, no cobwebs in the corners, and a framed photograph left where somebody could pick it up
Some floors keep their best find in a room at the far end that no working light reaches, three pieces of loot and often a gold bar, with nothing to make you go in but the money
Now and then, while your torch is on a wall some way off, a soft dark shape passes over it and is gone
Every so often a lamp a long way off starts stuttering to a rhythm nothing near you shares, and settles again after a few seconds
Somewhere on a floor with power, a phone rings once and stops, and nobody picks it up
Occasionally footsteps cross a room at the far end of the floor and are gone before you get there
Sometimes a pipe is struck three or four times, evenly, in a room at the far end of the floor
Go back to a room you have already been through and, once a floor, one or two things that were lying there are lying somewhere slightly different
The vending machine sells one scan at a time for $80, dearer with every scan bought and every floor climbed, to carry until you need it
The call button beside the lift doors opens a panel to ride up once the floor is clean and you are standing in the cabin - from out in the hall it reads STEP INTO THE LIFT rather than closing the doors in your face and leaving without you -, ride back down to a floor you have already worked, or end your shift
DOWN on the lift panel calls the car and waits, its lamp turning amber, the same as END SHIFT - you leave by stepping into the cabin, and pressing it again stays on the floor
END SHIFT on the lift panel does not clock you off where you stand - it calls the lift and waits, its lamp turning amber, and you leave by stepping into the cabin, so you can change your mind and press it again to stay on
Outlined batteries lie around the flats and top the flashlight back up
Outlined road flares turn up on most floors, more on blackouts
Now and then a kit lies in a bathroom, kitchen or sickroom and takes some dose off on the spot, a small free alternative to the vending machine's pills
Some front doors are nailed shut with planks, more often on derelict, sealed and collapsed floors
The lobby runs a ten step drill - sign for your card, take the dosimeter, the flashlight, the sponge and the field pack, fit the battery the torch needs, find the contaminated bag by ear, throw it in the drum, pack a piece of litter and unload it into the crate - with how to tip the pack out anywhere if you are caught short - ride up - one step at a time on a card at the top of the screen, a lit tag, a short instruction and a dimmer how-to line under it, with a single arrow hovering over whatever that step wants and no arrow over the contaminated bag, because finding that one is the lesson
With training on, floor 1 is a guided first floor - two sources, one of them shut away in a cupboard, one spill, and a scan and a flare handed out on the way up - and the drill carries on there a step at a time: two sources summing on the meter, walls muffling the clicks, a flare for a dark room, the scan, opening cupboards, following the clicks to the last one, and, if you pack a source, how to tip the pack out before it cooks you, scrubbing the spill, dose carrying over and the vending machine, then salvage against dose
The lobby and the first floor walk you through listening, probing, containing and the crate that buys litter, picking up whatever you are holding to say what it is worth, and every floor warns when the flashlight is running low
A main menu page explains listening, probing, containing, your hands, doors and cupboards, cash, dose and what cuts it, the flashlight, packing salvage and tipping the pack out, the AVTOMAT and the climb
Loose money, coins and gold bars hover and turn, outlined green where they lie, with payouts for each containment and each clean floor
A corridor lined with apartments, furniture, clutter, loot and ceiling lamps that grows with depth
Every flat has one front door off the corridor and a real home behind it, from a kitchen with a bedroom to a living room, kitchen, study, two bedrooms and a bathroom
Living rooms face a sofa toward the TV, kitchens gather chairs around the table, bedrooms put a bedside table by the bed and bathrooms have a toilet, all in mixed fabric and wood finishes
Hinged wooden doors hang in every flat doorway, matching front doors line the corridor, and each one is shut, ajar or wide open until you press E, always swinging away from the side you open it from
Living rooms have a ceiling fan whose blades throw shadows under the lamp
A framed elevator with a call button, whose lamp pulses red while contaminated items remain and turns green once the floor is clean
The doors unlatch and slide on a humming motor when you arrive, shut behind you once you step out, and open again when the floor is clean
Each floor's corridor is bare concrete or faded damask wallpaper, with a matching elevator
A second lift ends every corridor. On most floors it is boarded over, but not on all of them, and the only thing that says which is the dosimeter
However dark a floor is, one wall lamp somewhere on it is still burning, and the vending machine stutters where the mains have failed
Some ceiling lamps hum steadily and stutter out, and the further up you go the fewer of them are still lit and the weaker the ones that are
A bright handheld PSX flashlight on F with a switch click and a glowing lens, whose battery drains while it is on and whose beam dims and stutters in strong radiation, with a bright hot spot inside a wide soft spill and light that carries into the room around you - the walls and floor nearby pick it up, and a wall close in front of you throws it back
A service record on the main menu, set out in two even columns, shows your highest floor on a lit LCD beside the cash you carried there and your time in the block, and keeps the rest of the record between sessions - liquidators lost, deaths from exposure, times you pulled out, your highest floor and the cash you carried there, floors cleared, items contained, salvage sold and what it fetched, cash earned, pills and first aid kits taken, lethal doses absorbed and time spent in the block
Twenty s&box achievements, from signing for your kit and your first item in the drum to floor 15, five hundred items contained and clocking off with nearly a lethal dose, with a few kept hidden until they are earned
Instrument plates in the corners rather than text on the screen - a status plate with an indicator lamp, your liquidator number, the floor on its own seven-segment LCD and the cash recovered beside it, which lights up as money comes in, with the floor's condition on a marked line underneath
Lonely, haunting music plays only on the main menu, over a moonlit, abandoned living room behind the title, with cobwebs over the window and doorway, a curtain rod over the window and a cable run along the wall under the ceiling, a framed painting, rubble under the window, a chair turned to face it, a photograph fallen flat on the floor, a child's bricks scattered by the rug, a book on the rug and another open on the floor, a fish skeleton, a gas mask, a jerrycan by the door and a supply crate in the corner, a liquidator's map and walkie-talkie left on the coffee table under the dosimeter, a dropped torch still lighting the floor toward the window, its front door hanging open onto a corridor, a neighbour's shut door, a green-lit drum, a clicking dosimeter whose every click breathes a faint green light across the room, and Play, Daily Shift, How to Play, Stats, Options, Credits and Quit with a briefing line under them saying what the focused one does - where a saved shift stands, or which day's building the daily shift is - styled as a dosimetric survey terminal: a blinking cursor and marker on the focused line, a quieter Quit, a status light, the title that shrinks to a header while every page slides in as one panel bracketed at its four corners like every other panel in the game, a live trace of the menu's own counter clicks beside your highest floor, the cash on that run once there is any and the liquidators lost, and key caps for the controls in the footer, all kept inside a 16:9 frame on ultrawide screens
Every menu works with mouse, keyboard or controller, the focused item is always highlighted, opening a page, going back and flipping a switch each have their own click, and every button the game names is drawn as the real glyph for whatever you are holding, in the colour of the line it sits on, on the HUD and in the how-to-play alike
Press Q to stop mid-floor on a lit panel, then resume or head back to the main menu
Reduced screen static, a PSX pixel filter, colour dithering, film grain, the dose vignette, the glow around the drum, the crate and the kit worth picking up, in-game tips, the training drill, captions that name a sound with how far off and which way it is, and a probe that toggles instead of being held, that can each be switched and are remembered between sessions, a shortcut to audio and control settings, shown as lit selector switches, the presentation preset as one wide cell with arrows either side, with a line at the bottom explaining whichever one you are on, and a stats reset that asks you to press it twice, flashes red while armed, ignores an accidental double click and confirms when your record is gone
Stopping mid-floor brings up a survey terminal reading back your shift - the floor and its condition, your dose on a zoned bar, how long you have been on this floor, your cash, the contaminated items and the spills each struck off pip by pip and the kit you are carrying - above Resume, Options and Main Menu with the control keys along the bottom, where Options is the same page as the main menu's, the presentation preset, every picture switch, the item glow, tips and the training drill as lit selector cells with a line explaining the one you are on, a shortcut to audio and control settings, and the same key that paused takes you back
Attribution for the PSX Mega Pack I & II by Pizza Doggy's Game Assets, the Old Soviet Backpack by TwilightFox (CC BY 4.0), the Kiosk Machine – Retro Horror Vending Automat by ZwiebelGames (CC BY 4.0), the Skeleton Rigged Model by rosyjoan, the menu music by Dredile, the Geiger counter recordings by cookies+policy, every Freesound contributor whose recording is in the game and the Tektur, Departure Mono and DSEG fonts
Wallpapered, brick and concrete rooms with carpet, wood or tiled floors
The same bed, sofa, chair, shelf or cupboard turns up in a different finish from flat to flat, and the pills, keys, lighters, cash and junk lying about come in more than one make, so no two homes look furnished from the same catalogue page
Corridors carry a floor-to-ceiling riser pipe or two and a run of cabling along the ceiling that changes from floor to floor, and some rooms have a small vent grille high on the wall
Wide wooden-framed doorways connect the corridor and rooms
Barred windows on outside walls, the glass gone from more of them the further up you get, some of them letting the weather in, and a curtain rod over every one of them - still up, or down on the floor with everything else worth a dollar
Through every window the rest of the district stands in the dark - panel blocks and towers stepping taller into the distance with a scattering of windows still lit, fewer of them when the power is out, housings and masts on the roofs and a red beacon blinking on every tower, sodium lamps pooling orange along the streets below with a few cars left parked under them and now and then a patrol car crawling past with its blue light turning, dust hanging low between the rows, the street further down the higher you climb, your own block's windows running on below you, and off on one side the plant behind its cordon of lamps, its halls lit, its red and white stack rising over everything with beacons climbing it and smoke still drifting from the top, and a helicopter's lights circling it with a spotlight sweeping the ground
Every burning ceiling lamp stands a dithered cone of light down to the floor, drawn the way a PlayStation would fake it: dense at its core and thinning into the air at its edges instead of showing the outline of a cone, brightest where it leaves the fitting, dust drifting slowly through the volume rather than across its surface, still glowing in front of whatever stands inside it, cut off behind anything that blocks the lamp or the window, so a wardrobe or a table leaves a dark gap in the beam instead of the light passing straight through it, fading out before it reaches the floor, with specks of dust turning slowly inside it, scattered rather than set out in rows and fewer of them towards its edge, weaker on higher floors, stuttering with a failing lamp, and fading away as you walk under it
Some windows let a cold blue-grey shaft pour in through the whole opening and slant down to the floor, a soft-edged slab that keeps the shape of the window, leaving a pale patch where it lands, most often on a floor whose power is out and hardly ever where they shut every door
A faint dark line sits between every row of virtual pixels, the way a picture looked coming off a CRT, and it eases off with the rest of the presentation switches
Ceilings, corners, doorways and the space under furniture darken where the light cannot reach, shaded in chunky blocks on the same virtual pixel grid as the rest of the picture and broken up by the same dither, so it sits with the period look instead of smoothing it over
Corridors sink into black with distance the way they did on a PlayStation, heavier on a floor that has come apart or gone dark and barely there where every door is shut
Brown tide marks spread across the ceilings of bathrooms, kitchens and sickrooms, and some of them have left a dark wet patch on the floor under a drip you can hear
Cobwebs stir in any room whose window has lost its glass, and a living room fan that still has power turns slowly overhead
Faint specks of dust drift through the torch beam, more of them on a floor that has come apart and hardly any where everything was sealed
Clocks, light switches, outlets, vents, paintings, photographs and crosses flush against the wallpaper, caged wall lamps that are sometimes still burning, rugs on the floors, pipes along the corridor ceiling, bricks, cans and rubbish along the skirting that can all be picked up and thrown, and cobwebs in the corners that thicken with depth
A lidded wooden crate stands in every corridor
Wherever the floor has buried a source in its litter, the liquidator who found it first left their meter and their identity card beside it, worth what any other salvage is worth
From floor three up, some of the rubbish along the skirting is contaminated as well, so the litter you learned to walk past has to be swept too, and the further you go the more of the floor's sources hide in it
Texel-sharp sampling that stays steady in motion, with anisotropic mipmaps so floors keep their detail at grazing angles
A lightweight lighting model gives every lamp a soft falloff and keeps ambient fill so dark rooms stay readable, with floor, walls and ceiling each catching it differently so a room keeps its shape in the dark, a lamp's light and highlights stay in its own room, and a shadow breaks up into the same ordered dots as the rest of the picture rather than fading out softly at its edge
How rough a surface is decides both how wide and how bright its highlight is - barrels, pipes and metal floors shine like painted metal, elevator doors and gold bars like bare metal and stay readable in the dark, window glass, bottles and CRT screens catch small sharp glints, a tiled floor carries the glare of the lamp above it, a wet patch a controlled sheen, and toilets, plates and plastics a gentle one
The frame is drawn in 256 virtual lines of 15-bit colour with ordered dithering, while the HUD stays sharp
A retro picture with light sharpening, ambient occlusion that settles a soft shadow under whatever rests on the floor, darkens corners, seams, stair treads and recesses and fades for anything lifted clear of a surface, stepped into the same coarse dithered shades as the rest of the picture, without blocks around thin things like legs and poles, halos behind posts, or outlines round lamp pools, screens and notices, a single vignette at the edges of the frame that closes in as your dose climbs, a little colour fringing at the edges and colour that drains as your dose climbs
Light bounces once off whatever it lands on, so a lit wall brightens the floor and ceiling beside it and a coloured surface tints what faces it, for lamps and the torch alike, as a smooth glow with no streaks copied off bright edges
Colour quantization, dithering, dithered shadow edges, light bands, roughness, metalness, specular and reflection, screen-door alpha, opacity masks, unlit mode, emission and double-sided surfaces that are lit from whichever side you are standing on
From floor three a floor can arrive in a state of its own, named as you step out of the lift and kept in the corner while you work it - the power out and only the drum, the salvage crate and the lift to steer by
Ten flat layouts from a one-room bedsit to a six-room apartment, furnished as kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, studies, bathrooms, storage, a child's bedroom, a room where somebody was being looked after, and a plant room of rusted machinery and electrical cabinets humming behind a metal service door
Cable runs along every corridor ceiling, a row of mailboxes by the lift, a buzzing PA horn high on the wall, spare bulkhead lamps, peeling Soviet-era posters and graffiti that spreads as the block falls apart
Three fixture families, one chosen per floor, so a building has a character rather than a fitting, and a living room's fan carries a bulb of its own when the power is still on
The block breathes - a room tone under everything, water somewhere, the structure settling, wind through a window that has lost its glass, a fridge still humming in a kitchen that has power, pipes ticking in storerooms and along the corridor ceiling, and now and then a single impact from a floor you are not on, less often than you expect and more often the higher you are, sometimes shaking a little grit loose from the ceiling in front of you
Doors move while your back is turned, something further down the floor shifts where it lies, a hurled television is sometimes answered from a room you are not in, and a set that was switched off may crackle into static for a moment, though not on a floor whose power is out
The ride up shows the floor you are heading for, the dose you are taking with you and how far there is left to climb, instead of holding on black
Door creaks, slams and soft closes, flashlight clicks, pickups, thuds, the drum's clank, the elevator ride and doors, groans, distant knocks, drips, wind, pipe ticks, a fridge, fluorescent hum and buzz, TV static, falling grit, the room tone, the menu hum, a soft thock as you move through menus that never sounds like the dosimeter, cash, pills, the vending machine, the refusal buzzer, the dose alarm, beeps, the elevator bell and the collapse at death are real CC0 recordings from Freesound, resampled to 22 kHz for a PS1 sound, with steady hums and static looping seamlessly, and anything you drop or throw lands with a weight that follows how hard it hit
A capsule, header, hero and transparent logo for the Steam library, built from the game's own corridor and apartment renders under the same trefoil and GEIGER wordmark as the menu
Nothing on the manifest matches that.