← GAND GAMES DOSYA № SE-01 · TELGRAF VE ÂSÂR-I ATÎKA · MAHREMDİR
DOSYA 01 · TAYİN — THE POSTING

Devlet-i Aliyye — The Ottoman Commonwealth
Ministry of Communications and Antiquities · Telegraph & Antiquities Service

THE SUBLIME
ENGINE

The proper channels may loop forever. There is always one way in.

A rigid airship, lit gold along its gondola, passing low over a night-time Istanbul of domes, minarets and mooring towers.
Plate I — the Berlin mail, standing off Galata before dawn

It is 1930-something, and the Ottoman Empire never fell. It reformed instead — constitutionalised, industrialised, and came out of the Great War on the winning side. Three continents of railways, telegraph exchanges, airship lanes and quarrelsome provinces, held together by timetables and bargaining.

You are a troubleshooter for the Telegraph & Antiquities service. Part clerk, part engineer, part linguist. At Sirkeci Station a porter hands you a parcel with your name on it, and it is not your parcel.

Inside is a cipher cylinder that carries no message — only gear ratios. The ratios are railway timetables. Within the hour a German courier, a Soviet economist, an English antiquarian and a patient police inspector all want a word.

A point-and-click adventure in the register of the hand-painted 1990s: eight verbs, no inventory-shaped keys, and a bureaucracy you argue with.

GENREPOINT-AND-CLICK
ENGINEGODOT 4.7 · GDSCRIPT
PLATFORMLINUX · WINDOWS
DISPLAY640×360, INTEGER
LANGUAGESENGLISH · TÜRKÇE
ISSUED BYGAND GAMES
STATUSIN DEVELOPMENT
DOSYA 02 · MİZAN — THE MACHINE

02 — On a machine that predicts revolutions

Officially, Project Mizan was an economic planning calculator: rail capacity, grain supply, industrial output. Rooms of brass logic drums and punch cards, driven off a central steam shaft, because in this century a computer is a building and not a thing you carry.

Conspiracy theorists call it the Sublime Engine and say it predicts coups. You may safely assume this is pulp nonsense.

It does not merely predict crises. Powerful people began quietly acting on its forecasts — and the forecasts started coming true because they had been read.
The feedback loop: a prediction of unrest causes arrests, the arrests cause unrest, the model is proved right, and the state trusts it further. MIZAN FORECASTS UNREST IN THE PROVINCE THE MINISTRY, PRUDENTLY, MAKES ARRESTS THE ARRESTS CAUSE UNREST THE FORECAST WAS RIGHT. TRUST IT FURTHER. THE LOOP TIGHTENS and every turn of it is evidence
Fig. 1 — why the machine is never wrong

The prime minister who commissioned it understood what had happened and ordered the project dismantled. It was not dismantled. He has been dead some years, and every faction in this story claims to be completing his work. All of them are wrong about what it was.

This is an alternate history. Real people, places and institutions appear in circumstances that never happened, and nothing in it is a claim about any of them.

DOSYA 03 · ZABIT — THE RECORD

03 — Photographic record

Captured in engine at 640×360. Every background is lit by a source you can point at — a lamp, a furnace mouth, a signal lantern. Nothing in this world is lit by an overhead sun nobody pays for.

Sirkeci Station platform three before dawn: a steam locomotive under an iron-and-glass trainshed, a porter and an inspector in the lamplight, a departures board lettered in Ottoman script.
04:50 — Sirkeci, platform 3
The same platform with every interactive hotspot outlined in brass and named: the waiting express, Inspector Feridun, the porter, the timetable board, the mysterious parcel.
Hold Tab — every hotspot, named
The papers screen: Form 12-B needs a stamp, a queue number and a form, and the note beneath reads every office is waiting for another office.
The papers — a closed ring
A radio engineer's cluttered workshop in Galata: a green banker's lamp over a bench of brass instruments, the Galata tower framed in the window.
06:15 — Benaroya's workshop
The Ministry dispatch hall: a wall of numbered pneumatic tube mouths under a gilded imperial cypher, with a rack of routing labels alongside.
03:10 — Ministry dispatch hall
A Galata coffeehouse before dawn: a copper samovar, stained-glass lamps, and three strangers waiting at separate tables.
05:20 — three strangers, waiting
A sleeper compartment on the Taurus Express: marquetry panelling, a green-shaded lamp, a glass of tea, and the lit windows of the train curving away outside.
05:02 — the Taurus Express
Eight levels down in a Cappadocian underground city: a brass calculating machine of stacked drums beside an enormous carved stone door.
Cappadocia — the eighth level
The chart room in an airship gondola over the Aegean: a map table, a brass helm, and a wall of windows full of cloud and sea.
The Murat Reis, over the Aegean
DOSYA 04 · USUL — THE PROPER CHANNELS

04 — How it plays

Eight verbs

Chosen so that talking your way past a clerk carries the same weight as opening a door with a crowbar.

The bureaucracy is the puzzle

A document is a dependency graph of endorsements, and the legitimate path is allowed to be a closed ring. The stamp needs the form. The form needs the queue number. The queue number needs the stamp. That circle is the joke and it is also the lock.

A closed ring: the stamp requires the form, the form requires the queue number, the queue number requires the stamp — and a dashed red shortcut cuts into the ring from outside. THE STAMP requires the form THE FORM requires the queue number THE QUEUE NUMBER requires the stamp A BRIBE · A FORGERY · A FAVOUR · A PLAUSIBLE LIE
Fig. 2 — the ring, and the way in

House rules

  1. Bureaucracy is funny; its consequences are not. A form that cannot be filed is comedy. A person who cannot be found because a file was moved is not.
  2. Everyone is polite. Spies keep meeting socially. Enemies share tables. The manners are real and so are the stakes.
  3. Technology is infrastructural. If a puzzle could be solved by a device in someone's pocket, it is the wrong puzzle for this world.
  4. The alternate history creates new problems, never a utopia. Anything that reads as wish-fulfilment is wrong.
  5. No ethnicity is the villain. The antagonist is an idea about how states should be governed, held by a man who believes he is finishing a hero's work.
  6. Failure should usually produce a comic consequence or another route — not a game-over screen.
  7. The whole chapter is played by the test suite, start to finish, because a puzzle chain can be correct at every link and still be unwinnable as a whole.

Turkish, properly

The game ships in English and Turkish. The Turkish is not a gloss: it is written in an Ottoman register to match the setting, verb-last with the case suffixes no template can inflect, which is why the sentence templates are themselves translated. Devlet-i Aliyye is not a translation of "the Commonwealth" — it is what the Ottomans called their own state.

DOSYA 05 · İSTİDA — THE REQUEST

05 — Notification of release

No storefront has been assigned to this docket yet. To be notified when it opens, file a request with the issuing office — or consult the bureau's public board.

File a request ✉ The bureau · gand.games ↗

Issued by Gand Games. No ads. No tracking. The price, when it is assigned, is the price.