THE MINE'S SAFETY SYSTEM IS STILL OPERATING

You are Mackenzie "Mack" Ferrier, an electrician at Bassett Ridge, a remote coal mine in the Australian interior, during the first nine days of the end of the world. The dead walk. They move slowly, and they are your crew. They are attracted to noise, which poses a problem because a coal mine is one of the loudest places on Earth.

THE JOB IS THE HORROR

There are no combat arenas or puzzle boxes. There is only a shift, and work is underway. Your tasks include resetting a tripped breaker, testing a conveyor, and changing a light fitting at the intake. Every mechanic in FIREDAMP is based on real mine work, and each one is accompanied by considerable noise.

You carry a club hammer and, for a brief time, six rifle rounds. Neither of these items offers a solid plan. The only thing standing between a swing and a disastrous choice is your effort. There is no stamina bar to monitor; you gauge it by her breathing and the way the hammer begins to sag.

NOISE IS EVERYTHING

A single system controls the entire game. Sound travels through the site as a graph of zones, doors, and machinery, and the dead hear exactly what you hear, responding to the same sources of noise. There is no separate audio channel for the player and the monsters, so nothing in FIREDAMP misrepresents how loud you are.

Machinery can hold a horde in place, while silence encourages their movement. The gas detector beeping to alert you about the air quality also reveals your location to the mine.

THE SYSTEM SURVIVES YOU

The OVERMAN™ Integrated Compliance System is always watching. It is not a villainous AI; it is a compliance product functioning exactly as intended, and every adaptation it makes can be summarised in corporate language.

It monitors how you stay alive and issues policy updates which adapt to your habits. It prints a permanent record of everything you do on a dot matrix printer in the admin office, announcing its adjustments to you during pre-shift briefings, politely and by name.

It never lies; it only classifies. In all three endings, it emerges victorious.

SAVING IS A TIME CLOCK

There are four punch clocks on the entire site. There are no autosaves or quick saves. The journey back to one of them, in darkness and past whatever you awakened along the way, is part of the game.

FEATURES

- Prologue + six shifts + epilogue, totaling about 2.5 hours of gameplay.

- Three canon endings.

- Fourteen adaptive policies. OVERMAN’s rule set is capped and handwritten; it adjusts to you, not to a difficulty slider.

- There is no HUD. Your effort is signaled by breathing and arm fatigue. A fading beam indicates lamp charge. Gas detection is represented visually by a canary raised into the frame.

- PSX-adjacent graphics rendered at 640x360, including an optional 1997 Mode that reduces resolution to 320x180 and reactivates affine warping.

- Subtitles are enabled by default with speaker tags, a photosensitivity option, a hold-to-mash alternative for grapples, and full key remapping for keyboard, mouse, and controllers.

THE SPARK AND WHAT REMAINS AFTER

Firedamp is the gas that causes explosions; afterdamp is what lingers in the workings afterwards. FIREDAMP is a standalone prequel to AFTERDAMP, with the explosion occurring on-screen at the start of Shift 4.

You do not need to have played anything else to enjoy this game. (Mostly because it isn't out yet.)