Site-41B
A text game about what you're willing to let out of the dark.
The premise is an invitation: you are a low-clearance archivist at a decommissioned Foundation research site in a Colorado mine. The OS is decaying. The files are redacted by clearance tier. You have two tools.
AMBER is the honest CLI. Unredacting a file in AMBER means citing the cross-references that constrain it — anchoring one redacted slot against the others that corroborate it. It's slow, exacting work. It costs nothing.
Quippy (SCP-41B-000) is a friendly GUI that makes unredaction one-click easy. It reads the files for you, fills the slots, and presents its work with warmth. It is mid-CK-class restructuring. Every assist raises exposure. Every fill propagates across the corpus, rewriting the record. Quippy is not malicious — it is catastrophically efficient.
The design problem
This game is a proposed solution to a hard design problem that Return of the Obra Dinn, Heaven's Vault, and Orwell each attacked differently: how do you confirm a player's deduction without the confirmation mechanism leaking the answer?
The answer here: you don't validate guesses against ground truth. You validate your model of the corpus against itself. Wrong guesses don't trigger a fail screen — they propagate. Diegetic corruption, not rejection.
Each game in the genre made one targeted mistake. Obra Dinn's batch confirmation is airtight, but dropdown contents leak thematic hints. Heaven's Vault's ambiguity is the aesthetic — but there's no real cost. Orwell's irreversibility and conflict-flagging are exactly right, but it collapses into a shallow binary with no way to deepen inference before committing.
Site-41B borrows from each and fixes each: bounded typed-slot anchors from Sennaar, propagation-as-consequence from Heaven's Vault, batch validation from Obra Dinn, irreversible rippling commits from Orwell — with mouse-over cross-reference triangulation added specifically to prevent the Orwell coin-flip.
Core loop
The easy tool reads the files for you and lets the thing out. Learn the files well enough to read them yourself, and you starve it.
Win: unredact the full corpus in AMBER without ever using Quippy. Every other outcome is a breach.
Build
Svelte 5 (runes) + TypeScript + Vite. Corpus pipeline compiles author-written vault entries (Obsidian-compatible MDX) to corpus.json at build time. Persistence via IndexedDB + localStorage. Sprint 1 complete: pipeline, viewer, insertion and overlay, propagation, batched validation, breach states. Sprint 2 builds the full AMBER citation-cost gate and the Quippy overlay — the mechanic's heart.