serverBound

A detective game where the crime scene is somebody’s homepage.

Corporate AI broke the internet, so people rebuilt it by hand. Now something is eating it. Walk their paper-and-ink islands, read each one like a crime scene and work out the rule of whatever’s attacking it. Then fight it in a turn-based duel with no dice, no levels and no excuses.

Corporate AI broke the old internet. Nobody was surprised. So people built a new one by hand: the World Wide Wonder, a patchwork of tiny self-hosted islands with guestbooks, zines, visitor counters and at least one grandmother’s blog. It’s drawn in grey paper and ink. Anything red is a problem.

You are a lurker. It’s a real rank, and yes, it’s the bottom one. When something starts eating somebody’s server, you walk their island, read its records, listen in on its cables and ask the locals what they saw. Every clue drops words into a case report, and a sentence only locks when two different kinds of clue agree.

Then you plug in and prove it. The duel is turn-based, and every threat plays by a rule: ransomware takes the shortest way to the archive, a phisher hooks the nearest house, an ad server keeps making bots. Work the rule out and the fight is a puzzle. No levels, no hit points, no dice. You don’t get stronger. You just get less wrong.