THE MISSING FLOOR

A first-person psychological horror game set in a grimy 1980s apartment block at half past eleven at night.

The building officially has ten floors. The elevator sometimes offers an eleventh. You are a teenager looking into a resident who vanished years ago, and the more you learn, the more the corridors quietly rearrange themselves around you.

Controls. WASD walk · SHIFT run · CTRL crouch · mouse look · E interact · F torch · TAB inventory · J journal · ESC pause.

Press NEW GAME, walk in, and the first thing you are asked to do is find the lift.

The building

Eleven storeys, generated from code at play time and built as one rule per floor. The ground floor is a real entrance hall — the abandoned security desk with its log and its locked drawer, the bank of mailboxes with one hanging open, the noticeboard, the street lamps outside. Floors 2–5 are ordinary corridors with door openings cut into the walls and numbered plates. Floor 6 is abandoned and written on. Floor 7 is damaged, and 703 is built to its photograph: green door, brass plaque, peephole, folded newspaper, dead plant, damp stain. Floor 8 is hushed and holds the lift's own record book. Floor 9 is out of true. Floor 10 has the plant room, the fuse box and roof access. Floor 11 is the impossible one — the same corridor a little too long, its doors numbered so they repeat and skip.

A stairwell connects the floors and the lift shaft runs the full height. Only the storey you are on and its neighbours are lit; everything else is switched off.

The lift

The central mechanic, and it works: the doors close, the cab climbs, the indicator lights, and it carries you. The call panel is inside the cab — buttons 1 to 10, and an eleventh that is blank until you have a reason to know better.

The investigation

Six stages, driven by what is in your journal rather than by a script. The chain runs: the desk key under the desk → the desk drawer → the key to 703 → 703 itself → the photograph and the cassette; the plant room on 10 for the blueprint, the watch and the fuse box; the abandoned flat on 9 for the access card; and the eleventh floor for the rest.

Clues record themselves as you find them and fill in the journal. Notes are read, items are carried and unlock what they should, and the drawer will tell you why it will not open.

Five endings, none of them labelled until you reach one: leave by the front doors early, leave with the coin and the photograph, find out what happened to Maya Voss, stay upstairs too long, or put the whole record together at the desk computer.

The dread

A quiet bed of the building and rare cues — a strip ticking before it dies, a distant door, footsteps one floor up, the lift arriving, breathing. Silence is the default. Something walks the corridor you are on, keeps its distance, drifts toward noise, and is gone when the torch reaches it. Let it get close and the lights flicker, the torch fails, a door closes behind you, and you wake at the last checkpoint with no memory of the walk.

What is still thin

• Three of the eight sound cues (the lift arriving, footsteps above, a door creak) failed to generate — the generator ran out of credits — so those three moments are silent. The other five play.
• There are no photographs, paintings, mirrors, computer screens or phone props in the building yet; the readable things are simple paper, and the signature objects are still built from boxes.
• Nothing changes about the building itself as the story advances yet beyond a door opening and a message.

Notes for anyone picking this up

• /zero/source/design/spec.md is the contract — the shared vocabulary, the rules, and what each part answers to.
• /zero/source/design/references/ holds the six pictures the look is built to.
• The build is split so the building, the player's hands, the screens, the story and the sound are separate systems that meet through game/core.module's bus and never write each other's files. Add to one without touching the others.