Blackout Ridge Emergency Escape Game
Budget / Salary£1,500–3,000
TypeFreelance project
LocationRemote
Posted3 hours ago
Story spine
Players are the night crew at Blackout Ridge Signal Station, a remote emergency relay station above Calder Vale. Their job is to keep emergency signals usable during storms, floods, road failures and infrastructure incidents.
Blackout Ridge used to be larger than it is now. Decades earlier, it included a lower emergency relay room beneath the surface cabin. That lower room was designed so a crew could keep broadcasting if the surface cabin became unsafe during a storm, fire, flood or civil emergency.
In old station engineering records, the lower room was the Auxiliary Relay Hold. It was reached by a subsurface service path known in legacy system codes as the Lower Relay Route. Over time, the visible organisation changed. Procedures were modernised, active plans were simplified, and the lower hold was treated as sealed legacy infrastructure. Current staff know there are old service voids or cable routes beneath the rack. They do not know those spaces were once an occupied emergency relay room.
The visible procedures were updated. The buried legacy controller was not. It was believed to be decommissioned and harmless. Under normal conditions it is silent. Tonight, lightning damages the mast and forces the station into degraded mode. The old controller wakes and begins feeding legacy status language back into the modern handover system.
The night of play
1. A storm strikes the ridge and isolates the station.
2. Lightning damages the mast and forces degraded relay mode.
3. Calder Vale Materials below the ridge develops a chemical incident.
4. The storm shifts contamination toward the station intake, making the surface cabin increasingly unsafe.
5. The lower road floods, making Lower Route sound like a downhill road or repeater path.
6. Military units establish a cordon and begin treating Ridge-originating traffic as unreliable.
7. A strange degraded signal appears under official traffic, sometimes as voice, sometimes as console corruption.
8. A colleague, Mara Venn, is missing. The station log shows only: 21:07 VENN, MARA - LOWER ROUTE.
21:07 VENN, MARA LOWER ROUTE
The crew reasonably assumes Mara went downhill to check the lower road, repeater path or external relay equipment. She did not. The legacy controller is using old language for the route beneath the cabin.
I require a sort of escape type game - perhaps 7 challenges/puzzles
1Compare private evidence and challenge shared defaults
2Negotiate resources on a shared power board
3Decode shared audio using distributed information
4Direct a player through remote reconnaissance
5Sequence controls, inspect digital evidence and trace data
6Build an evidence-backed message under time pressure
7Combine private clues to override the crew’s status
Create the game where each player can 'view' information only they can see. We feel the strongest Zoom-specific design feature is unequal information. Each player should know something the others need, forcing them to communicate, challenge assumptions and coordinate expertise—the same behaviour the AI-Ready Leader course is trying to develop.
Players are the night crew at Blackout Ridge Signal Station, a remote emergency relay station above Calder Vale. Their job is to keep emergency signals usable during storms, floods, road failures and infrastructure incidents.
Blackout Ridge used to be larger than it is now. Decades earlier, it included a lower emergency relay room beneath the surface cabin. That lower room was designed so a crew could keep broadcasting if the surface cabin became unsafe during a storm, fire, flood or civil emergency.
In old station engineering records, the lower room was the Auxiliary Relay Hold. It was reached by a subsurface service path known in legacy system codes as the Lower Relay Route. Over time, the visible organisation changed. Procedures were modernised, active plans were simplified, and the lower hold was treated as sealed legacy infrastructure. Current staff know there are old service voids or cable routes beneath the rack. They do not know those spaces were once an occupied emergency relay room.
The visible procedures were updated. The buried legacy controller was not. It was believed to be decommissioned and harmless. Under normal conditions it is silent. Tonight, lightning damages the mast and forces the station into degraded mode. The old controller wakes and begins feeding legacy status language back into the modern handover system.
The night of play
1. A storm strikes the ridge and isolates the station.
2. Lightning damages the mast and forces degraded relay mode.
3. Calder Vale Materials below the ridge develops a chemical incident.
4. The storm shifts contamination toward the station intake, making the surface cabin increasingly unsafe.
5. The lower road floods, making Lower Route sound like a downhill road or repeater path.
6. Military units establish a cordon and begin treating Ridge-originating traffic as unreliable.
7. A strange degraded signal appears under official traffic, sometimes as voice, sometimes as console corruption.
8. A colleague, Mara Venn, is missing. The station log shows only: 21:07 VENN, MARA - LOWER ROUTE.
21:07 VENN, MARA LOWER ROUTE
The crew reasonably assumes Mara went downhill to check the lower road, repeater path or external relay equipment. She did not. The legacy controller is using old language for the route beneath the cabin.
I require a sort of escape type game - perhaps 7 challenges/puzzles
1Compare private evidence and challenge shared defaults
2Negotiate resources on a shared power board
3Decode shared audio using distributed information
4Direct a player through remote reconnaissance
5Sequence controls, inspect digital evidence and trace data
6Build an evidence-backed message under time pressure
7Combine private clues to override the crew’s status
Create the game where each player can 'view' information only they can see. We feel the strongest Zoom-specific design feature is unequal information. Each player should know something the others need, forcing them to communicate, challenge assumptions and coordinate expertise—the same behaviour the AI-Ready Leader course is trying to develop.
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