DEADLOCK PROTOCOL

"Orientation is over. Your shift has just begun."

THE SETUP

You signed on for the promise of rapid career advancement, extensive hazard pay, and full life insurance coverage. What the onboarding packet conspicuously omitted was why Sector 9 Logistics Complex has remained under high-level corporate quarantine and federal containment for the better part of a decade.

You regain consciousness on the filthy, discolored tile floor of an abandoned breakroom, your skull pounding with violent migraine spikes. Your throat feels raw, your limbs leaden, and your mind struggles to piece together the hours that followed your orientation. The only coherent thought that cuts through the fog is a chilling realization: "It feels like I've been sleeping for ages... what happened?"

Directly above you, the overhead industrial conduits have ruptured, spewing thick, rancid plumes of bioluminescent green fog into the corridors. The company brass assured the public that the historical spill of this experimental compound was neutralized and safely entombed behind airtight blast shutters years ago. They lied.

The mist is chemically volatile, pervasive, and mutating everything caught within its envelope. The facility’s automated security protocols have triggered full emergency containment: heavy magnetic blast doors have locked down from the exterior, the primary power grid has plunged into dead-circuit failure, and the night shift workforce that mysteriously vanished nearly a decade ago never actually vacated the premises. Mutated into light-averse, acoustic-sensitive abominations, they now prowl the storage bays, hunting for anything warm that still breathes.

SURVIVAL HORROR REDEFINED

DEADLOCK PROTOCOL is an atmospheric, slow-burn first-person survival horror game built from the ground up in Unity. Rooted deeply in the design philosophy of classic survival horror and modern immersive stealth simulators, the game drops you into a cavernous, claustrophobic industrial complex where line-of-sight is swallowed by dense chemical fog and every audible clatter can summon your executioner.

You are not an augmented super-soldier, an armed federal agent, or a trained hazardous-materials specialist. You are an underpaid maintenance contractor caught in the wrong sector at the worst possible time. With no specialized firepower at your disposal, brute force is an absolute death sentence. Survival requires cautious navigation, surgical conservation of vital resources, strict spatial awareness, and the mental composure to step into pitch-black corridors while your stamina and health steadily tick away.

Escaping the facility demands overriding the perimeter deadlock. You must scavenge fragmented work logs, restore the complex’s auxiliary electrical infrastructure by tracking down isolated mechanical switchboards, bypass sealed magnetic bulkheads, and unseal heavily fortified utility hubs—such as the locked Generator Room—all while keeping your flashlight's narrow beam steady and your movements nearly silent.

KEY GAMEPLAY PILLARS

• Suffocating Bioluminescent Fog & Impaired Visibility: The sickly green mist hanging in the air is an ever-present environmental threat. It rolls across warehouse floors, pools in low-elevation maintenance trenches, and limits your forward vision to mere paces ahead. Familiar industrial rooms transform into disorienting, claustrophobic mazes where structural dead-ends, scattered hazards, and stalking predators remain concealed until you are practically on top of them.
• Tactical Grid Inventory & Hotbar Scarcity: Every salvaged item counts, but your carrying capacity is strictly constrained. Through a retro-styled, cell-based inventory grid, you must carefully evaluate what gear deserves a slot in your pack. Standard handheld flashlights, replacement fuses, ammunition, analog keycards, and scavenged health boosters must all compete for the same limited slots. A dedicated quick-select hotbar lets you access vital tools when immediate threats emerge, forcing you to prioritize preparation over panic.
• Analog Puzzles & Facility Engineering: Overriding the lockdown protocol requires hands-on problem solving. Piece together the complex's inner workings by searching bloodstained break tables, employee lockers, and abandoned offices for torn personal notes and handwritten administrative codes. From locating the scrawled Generator Room Password on coffee-stained scrap paper to throwing heavy conduit toggle switches along peeling concrete walls, progress is earned through observation, exploration, and spatial memory.
• Acoustic Stealth & Light Discipline: The mutated workers roaming the shadows cannot see through the fog, but their acoustic perception is hyper-developed. Sprinting over loose metal floor grates, fumbling through shipping containers, or kicking discarded industrial debris across concrete will instantly alert nearby stalkers to your coordinates. Your flashlight provides a tight, focused cone of illumination through the murky chemical gloom, but swinging it recklessly down long corridors can expose your presence to entities lurking at the boundary of the darkness.
• Environmental Storytelling & Lore of Sector 9: Uncover the true timeline of the catastrophe by assembling the scraps left in the wake of the original disaster. Torn shift journals, corporate cover-up memos, frantic whiteboard warnings, and personal worker logs expose the gross negligence and sinister corporate experiments that led to the permanent quarantine of Sector 9.
• Immersive Industrial Audiovisual Design: Experience high-tension Unity visuals driven by gritty, realistic industrial texturing, dense volumetric lighting, and a dynamic heads-up display tracking your essential vitals. Built with visceral, spatial 3D audio design, every distant drip of contaminated water, groaning steel support beam, and wet, scraping footstep echoes around your ears to keep you on edge from the moment you wake up to the final second of your shift.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
• Processor: Intel Core i5-4460 / AMD FX-6300
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (4 GB) / AMD Radeon R9 280
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 4 GB available hard drive space
• Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card
• Additional Notes: Stereo headphones are strongly recommended for spatial audio and stealth awareness

Recommended:

• OS: Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit)
• Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 / AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 4 GB available SSD space
• Sound Card: Surround-sound capable audio device or high-fidelity gaming headset

DEVELOPER STATEMENT

"Deadlock Protocol was born from a desire to bring genuine mechanical tension and slow, calculating dread back into indie horror. There are no safe spaces, no hand-holding map markers, and no easy exits. Keep your wits about you, watch your battery levels, memorize every access code you uncover, and never linger in the mist for too long."