About this project

ADRENOCHROME: The Halcyon Protocol is a browser game about reading paperwork carefully in a building that does not want to be read. You play an assessor sent to catalogue a research facility that was emptied in a single night in 1986, and everything you learn, you learn from what the people who worked there left behind.

About the title

The word in the title is a colour. In this story, Adrenochrome is the manufacturer's name for a rust-red lighting gel — catalogue designation ADR-7 — installed in the observation rooms because somebody believed a specific wavelength affected how test subjects slept. That is the whole of it. The game is not about, and does not endorse, any of the conspiracy material that has attached itself to the word elsewhere. If you came here looking for that, this is not that.

ADRENOCHROME is a work of fiction. The Halcyon Research Complex, the Halcyon Protocol, Vessel Integrated Systems, every character, document, recording, chemical and event in this game are invented for entertainment. Nothing here describes real people, real organisations, or real events.

What it actually is

• A first-person investigation played in the browser, on a phone as readily as on a desktop.
• Ten rooms in Chapter One, each hand-drawn rather than assembled from a kit.
• Twenty-two documents, six recorded logs and four surveillance clips, all written for this story.
• Seven puzzles, every one solvable from things you can find in the building.
• Three endings that follow from three decisions you actually make.

What it is not

• There are no jump scares. The horror is in what the documents imply.
• There is no fail state. You cannot die, and you cannot lock yourself out of an ending by exploring.
• There is no energy meter, no timer forcing you on, and no currency to top up.
• Nothing you buy makes a puzzle easier. Cosmetics are cosmetic.

How it is built

The game runs on a plain PHP application with a small JavaScript client. Everything that matters — what you have found, what you have solved, which ending you are heading for — is decided on the server. The client submits attempts; it never awards anything to itself. That is why a leaderboard time here means something, and why a save cannot be edited from the console.

Every puzzle has an alternative that does not depend on colour or hearing. Every recording has a full written transcript. Every surveillance clip has a written description of what happens in it. None of that is an afterthought bolted on at the end — a clue that only exists in audio is a clue that does not exist, so the game does not have any.

Content notes

Chapter One deals with sleep deprivation, institutional negligence, and staff who knew something was wrong and filed a form instead of stopping it. There is no gore and no on-screen violence. The content notes page lists the specifics, including which ones can be turned down in settings.

Who makes it

It is a small independent production. The writing, art, recordings and code are made for this game and are not licensed from a library. It is funded by the people who buy later chapters and by advertising on the public pages — never inside a chapter.

Talking to us

Use the contact form. It opens a tracked ticket you can follow on this site, and it is the only way in: there is no public inbox to write to instead.