Tracking

You inherited an archivist's desk: a VCR, a monitor, a shelf of seven tapes and a note. Every tape is damaged and you clean it the slow way. The tracking knob moves a band of noise up and down the picture. The head cleaner takes the hiss down, but the kit only has so many uses. The frame scrubber steps one frame at a time, and if you hold a frame still long enough it locks and stays clean.

Clean enough of a tape to read the cue hidden in it: a channel number on a television set, a clock in a shop window, a stencil on a crate. The cue names the next label on the shelf. Pick the wrong one and you spend cleaner on a blank dub.

On two of the tapes the picture only settles when the tracking is deliberately wrong, and the error itself lines up into digits. The noise is the message.

The camera never leaves the desk. The lamp hums, the clock moves through the night, the room behind you creaks when someone is on screen. The last tape asks you for a choice: erase it, as the note begs, or throw the TX switch and air it.

Six tapes, two endings, one sitting. The browser demo is tape one, up to the first cue. The full game is a Windows download (Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit).

Keys: P play or pause, R and F rewind and fast forward, arrows step frames, Q and E turn the tracking knob, hold Space to lock a frame, C cleans the heads, 1 to 7 load a tape, N opens the notebook, Esc opens the menu.

Disclosure: the code was written with an AI coding agent and the story text was drafted with AI help and edited by a person. Every picture and sound is generated by scripts, with no image or audio assets.