Phantom Burn 0.1
Phantom Burn 0.1 is out! It's the first piece of a stealth game set in Crash The Stack's world. Burn has to climb Gibson's tower floor by floor without being seen, and this release is the first floor of the climb, plus a practice run to learn the ropes.
Practice first
If you've never played, start with PRACTICE. Crash runs you through a simulation of the tower: eight small rooms, one idea each. You learn how the dark hides you, how loud different floors are under your feet, how to time a patrol, how to use your deck on the building's devices, and how to get past a camera. Crash talks you through it, and nothing you do in there counts.
Floor 14, the offices
INFILTRATE is floor 14: a lobby with a mezzanine, a long corridor, a print room, glass meeting rooms, an open plan with a couple of monitors left on, the facilities manager's office, a server closet, and a kitchen with a service lift at the back. One robot patrols it, two cameras watch it, and a night cleaner vacuums the open plan (it won't chase you, but it will tell on you).
You arrive with a STAFF deck, which can ring a phone or start a print job to pull the patrol somewhere else. What you need is FACILITIES, and there are three ways to get it: the manager's badge is in a desk drawer, the manager's password is on a sticky note, and someone left a session logged in down in the server closet. Only the badge opens the stairwell door, though. Without it, you'll have to call the service lift.
Gibson remembers
The building learns from you. If the patrol notices a phone that rings for no reason, it stops falling for phones. If it walks into a room you darkened, the floors above get emergency lighting. When you leave the floor, Gibson's patch notes list everything that was noticed, and the floors above will be built on top of what he learned. If nobody noticed anything, the patch notes say NO CHANGES. That's the goal.
How to play
Move with WASD and look with the mouse. Hold Shift to sneak, press F to use things, and hold T (or the right mouse button) to point your deck at a device. Sneaking on carpet is quiet; running on marble is not. Staying in the dark matters more than anything else: the eye at the bottom of the screen shows how visible you are.
You can play it right now at phantomburn.net/badge-in, on a computer or a phone. Your best time and fewest incidents on floor 14 are remembered in your browser.
This is only the beginning. Floor 27, the plant floor, is next.
Good luck!