THE PREMISE
It began with a floppy disk.
An old disk opens an unexpected connection to the Government Department of Records: an institution dedicated to the preservation, organisation and occasional misplacement of information.
Its records are fragmented. Its offices are strangely quiet. Its computer systems have survived considerably longer than anyone intended.
Your assignment is straightforward: recover the records, reconstruct the department and establish what happened.
Curiosity is not an officially recognised job requirement.
It may, however, prove useful.
THE INVESTIGATION
Follow the paper trail.
Explore a forgotten workplace
Navigate offices, corridors and departmental facilities. Inspect furniture and equipment, and read the environment for clues.
Bring the archive back to life
Operate a command-line terminal to restore damaged collections of records. Recovery capacity is limited to 1,440 KB, so not everything can be recovered at once.
Make sense of what remains
Read recovered documents, discover connections and keep track of important findings in your Recovery Notebook.
Investigate at your own pace
Multiple difficulty settings offer different levels of assistance. Manual saves and autosaves let you return to the case later.
THE ATMOSPHERE
Old machines. Odd procedures.
Pixel graphics, CRT effects and terminal interfaces recall an earlier era of computing. Procedurally generated sound and music accompany a mystery told through the department’s spaces and paperwork.
Expect dark humour, questionable bureaucracy and instructions that reward careful reading. No previous Civil Service experience is required.