IRONWAKE

The year is 2050. A nuclear war left the surface a radioactive graveyard. The only thing worth anything now is buried in a sealed Soviet bunker beneath the ruins of Kazakhstan, Sector V-4, and no living body can reach it. So they send a mind instead. Yours. Uploaded down a neural link into UNIT MARK-1, an industrial robot that has been asleep behind the airlocks for decades. You wake up as a ton of cold iron, alone in the dark, with one voice on the radio for company and a job you were told to finish at any cost. Something else in the bunker is awake. You cannot fight it. You can only listen for it, kill your lights, hold still, and hope it passes. WHAT YOU DO - Be the machine. One operator on the radio is your only link to the world above, and your only company in the deep. He guides you through it. He is all you have. - Survive the hunter. One thing stalks Sector V-4, and it cannot be beaten in a fight. It hunts by light and by sound. Cut your power completely and you vanish, but you also go blind and helpless. - Break into dying machines. You don't repair systems from the outside. You dive inside them, into the digital guts of failing hardware, and solve your way back out while your defenceless body stands exposed in the real world. - Descend through a bunker that keeps getting worse. Warm, human rooms give way to steam-choked assembly halls, a cold electric substation, and something green and organic in the deepest dark. - Uncover a hidden story, choose an ending. Clues are hidden across the bunker for anyone who stops to look. What you find, and how much of it, decides how this ends. There is more than one way out. Not all of them are mercy. - Soviet brutalism through a CRT. You see everything through MARK-1's failing screen: barrel distortion, static, scanlines, phosphor glow. Industrial gigantism, rendered in digital decay. People up top are dying without what's buried in this bunker. You were told to bring it back at any cost. Nobody told you what that cost was.