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loot · extract · survive
getting in is easy. getting out is the game.
coming to steam
what it is
You go into a sealed district for whatever is worth carrying, and then you have to get home. The wire around it leaks in a hundred places and the wardens know it — leaving is what costs you. There are three ways out and each one asks for something different: money, timing, or being seen.
transit — the first district
One canonical district rather than a fresh maze every raid, so the roads, the courtyard, the scrapyard and the rail line are all knowable. Weather and a full day and night run on their own clock, whether you are there or not.
the three ways out
One is free and instant and puts a helicopter over your head. One wants money and a conversation. One only turns up at midnight and will not wait. Which one you can use is decided long before you reach it.
costs nothing · the easy one
Pop the green smoke, stand in it, and five seconds later a bird comes in over the treeline with a rope. No fee, no waiting, no talking to anybody — it is the easiest way out of the district. It also puts green smoke and a helicopter directly above where you are standing.
click anywhere to throw the smoke
costs 30 brass
The warden sits a booth on the district edge, and you have to talk to him first. Pay him and the wire stops caring for the rest of the raid — after that you can drive out through the gate whenever you want. He does not ask what is in the bag. Asking costs him time and you money.
costs time
One train, once a night, at midnight. It slides into the yard, stands there for a minute, then counts down and pulls out — whether you made it aboard or not. Free, if you can be in the right place at the right hour.
how it is made
No asset packs, no drawn files. The whole game — every sprite, tile, font and painting — is produced deterministically from one script and a fixed palette. The art is hand-painted. In Python.
and it speaks six languages
Translated end to end, and it switches live — change it mid-raid and the world changes under you. The font was drawn glyph by glyph to cover them.
six years later, people still go in for what is left.
where it is
The world is finished and walkable. Everything after it is still being built, in this order, by one person, most days.
01The district, the barricade ring and the marksmen past it. Weather and a full day and night on their own clock. Driveable cars, interiors with second floors, the map screen, all three ways out, and the debrief that ends a raid.
02Mouse aim, hitscan with tracers, muzzle flash, screen shake and props that come apart. A second district underneath this one — passages behind bookshelves, two street manholes, ladders down and back up, and corridors lit only by whatever fixtures still work. Plus the opening: a painted cinematic that dissolves through dawn mist straight into the game, and a voice on the radio talking you in.
03Grid inventory with real footprints, containers to search, a gear doll, and the stash — the first thing that carries between raids, and so the first thing worth losing. Value is scarcity, condition and weight. No rarity colours. This one comes before the enemies on purpose: a firefight is only tense when you are carrying something, and until the stash exists there is nothing to lose.
04Two kinds, so a raid is not the same fight twice. People — and not all of them want to shoot; some run, some want paying first. And the machines the wardens left behind when they sealed the place: still running a route six years later, logging what is on it. One of those you outfight. The other you have to time, because it was always coming, and being seen by it costs you more than being shot at.
05Repair what came back damaged, make ammo, and upgrade the stash itself. It needs the loop first for a plain reason: the things you craft with are the things you found out there. No separate crafting currency, nothing to grind — if you want to build something, you have to have carried the parts home.
06Events you can start, and then have to survive. Fuel the scrapyard crane and it digs for minutes, loudly, until it stops and you strip what it pulled up. Cut into the old service seams underground, where the parts worth having are thickest. Both take time you might not have, both pin you to one spot, and both make enough noise to bring company.
07Quests. The first one is already standing in the world: one house has its power box hanging open and arcing, and no working light inside.
08A second district, built to be nothing like this one — no reruns of roads and houses. One is a single colossal interior of halls, catwalks and furnaces. One makes water the map. One is an alley warren with a road across its roofs.
09Everything above, finished and balanced against each other rather than shipped in pieces: the guns, the enemies, the tunnels, the opening, the loop, crafting, the events, the quests and a second district to take them all into. Somebody to sell to, which is what finally closes the economy — until there is a buyer, a haul is just weight. Bots so a raid is never empty when nobody else is online. The full lighting pass. And the unglamorous half of shipping: performance on machines people actually own, every key rebindable, and six languages in the box. It already runs without Vulkan — that call was made early and on purpose, because a launch-day "won't start" is a refund.
10Co-op and pvp. The server decides what happened — where you are, whether that shot landed, what was in the container — so the whole family of cheating that works by lying to it simply has nothing to say. And it only tells your machine about things you could plausibly perceive, because you cannot draw a wall-hack around information you were never sent.
On top of that sits the assay: it watches rather than swings. An account gets flagged, observed, and acted on later — never yanked mid-raid on a hunch, and never told which of its tricks gave it away. No kernel driver. Nothing here needs a ring-0 hook to run, and shipping one is precisely what shuts Linux and handhelds out — a door this game means to keep open rather than one it has already walked through.
Deliberately undated, and honestly so: it changes how the game keeps time. This one is a foundation, not a feature, so it gets built with the netcode or not at all.
Numbered because it is a real sequence — each stage is gated on the one before it. 01 to 09 is the game you buy; 10 is where it keeps going after that. No dates. It ships when it is done, and every version's notes are readable in game.