The Night Shift

Station 13. November 27th, 1984. 02:43 AM.

You're Cole Ashford — twenty-eight, three months into your first remote posting as a NOAA meteorology engineer. Your partner left days ago on a family emergency; his replacement was due yesterday. The blizzard arrived instead.

The duty roster taped to the break room wall lists thirteen names going back to 1976. Yours is the fourteenth, and it's the only one still written in pen.

Then the radio catches a signal it shouldn't — 108.7 MHz, dead air until tonight. The seismograph logs a spike thirty meters directly under your chair, in solid bedrock. And somewhere in the sub-levels, Door Four has a sign on it that just says not to open it. No further explanation given.

The Night Shift is a text-driven horror mystery told entirely through the terminal of a 1980s weather station. Every choice branches the night down one of three routes — and what's waiting at the end of each one is never the same story twice.

FEATURES

• Three branching routes and ten distinct endings — no single night shows you the whole picture
• A station that's actually alive: real-time seismograph, thermal camera, shortwave radio, and a hypothermia meter that does not forgive carelessness
• Thirteen predecessors, each with their own dossier — identify them one clue at a time
• Fourteen personal cassette tapes, recorded by the observer who had this desk before you
• An idle mode that turns your own screen into a surveillance tape — watching you as much as you're watching it
• A full 1983 phosphor-green CRT terminal mode, for the complete archival read
• Fully playable on a controller, with 10 language localizations

Thirteen people worked this post before you. Every one of them left a name on that wall.

Not all of them left a note explaining why they stopped.

The station is still transmitting. Somebody should probably answer.