Everything you need to know before entering the investigation
You'll receive a character sheet — your identity, your relationships, and your personal stakes. You don't know everything about who you are yet. Neither does anyone else.
This is your starting point. What you learn from here is up to you.
Unlock — Marcus's lockdown protocol has left extracted memories and evidence scattered throughout the warehouse, secured behind locks and puzzles. Work through his security measures to access memory tokens.
Scan — Read token contents using one of Marcus's memory display scanner prototypes.
Decide — After scanning a token to read its contents, choose what happens to each memory you recover:
Negotiate directly with other players. Give, swap, leverage, or return a memory to its rightful owner.
Turn the memory in as evidence. Its summary is posted to the Evidence Board for all to see. Exposed memories can be cited in the group's final statement.
Sell the memory to be permanently erased. Its contents are gone forever — no one can reference them again. Payment is deposited to the account of your choosing:
Shell account — a name you choose. Anonymous. Can be shared by multiple individuals.
Personal account — your name. Traceable to you.
The more sensitive the information, the more valuable it is to NeurAI's board of directors to have it disappeared.
That's the loop. But you're not alone in it.
Others are unlocking memories too — about themselves, about you, about what really happened to Marcus... Furthermore some puzzles require you to get information that only others know.
Two displays track the fallout in real time, visible to all:
Evidence Board — summaries of every exposed memory.
Account Ledger — all account names and their current balances.
What is found, what is shared, what is hidden... all of that is the game.
The clock is always running.
When the recovery window closes, transactions end. The police are on their way. The group must agree on one witness statement before they break through.
Only memories on the Evidence Board can be cited as evidence. Buried memories are gone. Not every exposed memory needs to appear in the statement — the group decides which evidence to cite, and which to leave out.
Your character has personal reasons for wanting certain memories exposed or buried. But the witness statement is collective — the version of events everyone agrees to stand behind.
Find a story you can all live with before time runs out.
You leave, hopefully before the cops bust your unofficial investigation and take you in for questioning... But the story doesn't end.
After the game, you'll receive a personalized investigative report on the Nova News blog — showing how your choices shaped the official story. You'll catch pieces of the narrative you may have missed during your session. The link will be emailed to you after the game.