Games Like ANOMIA: Listening Post K-7

Somewhere north. Listening Post K-7.

1977. You were flown in hooded. You don't know where you are, only what the post is called and what Control expects of you: find the signals, log the signals, keep the stove lit, and stay indoors.

ANOMIA is a one-room, first-person horror game about listening. You are the replacement operator of a three-metre hut on the ice, alone with a radar scope, an antenna you turn by hand, a reel-to-reel deck and a teletype that only ever speaks to you in capitals. The last operator, Varga, left before relief arrived. Varga also left tapes.

THE WORK

Every shift, Control sends a quota. Out on the scope, the contacts drift in from the dark: whistlers off the aurora, pulsars, telemetry chirps, code. Some of them sound like a choir that has forgotten the song.

It's simple. It's meant to be. The hard part is everything else.

THE HUT

The generator needs pumping. The fuses blow. The antenna ices over, and you'll see it turning white if you climb onto the bunk and look out through the slot window, out across the snow toward the mountains you can sometimes make out, toward the other hut you're sure nobody lives in. The stove needs coal. The coffee machine works, mostly.

And at night the radar shows something pale, going round and round the post, a little closer each time.

THE RULES

Nobody gives you the rules. Varga does, eventually, one tape at a time, hidden wherever Control won't think to look. You'll learn them the way Varga did.

Don't open the door. Whatever it sounds like.

THE WORDS

Something out there is getting into the language. As the nights go on, the labels on your console start to slip. The teletype loses its nouns. Varga's tapes stop being able to say what things are called. You will have to learn the hut with your hands, by colour and by position, because by the end that's all you'll have.

FEATURES

A NOTE ON PLAYING

Play in the dark. Wear headphones. Write things down.

The operator listens. The operator does not answer.