INTERFERENCE
Three years after the collapse, a radio technician hears his old call sign on a forbidden frequency and crosses the ridge to repair a relay now controlled by the Pact.
Three tracks included. You can replace them with custom files in settings.
Customize your survivor and select a permanent trait. Every advantage has a cost.
Three years after the collapse, one working radio and a folding solar panel are all that keep the fire tower connected to the valley.
The radio is on the ground. Retrieve it to use receiver, map, and music.
Static. Fragments of a Pact transmission.
Tears for Fears
1 OF 3 TAPES RECOVERED
If left behind, you lose map, communications, and music until retrieved.
The radio is off, drained, or out of range.
Names appear only after discovery and selection.
Current sight is clear, explored terrain is grey, and unknown terrain is black.
Choose carried gear to equip, use, or drop.
The bypass is your work: installed three years ago for a local defense committee that became the Pact. Rebooting K-12 will also let the unauthorized 101.7 carrier break through.
STORY PREVIEW This overview reveals the premise behind the voice at the end of the demo.
Wind worries the bolts of an old fire tower. Below it, a river catches the first light, a highway disappears into pine, and smoke rises beside the dam. A radio technician snaps a connector into a receiver rebuilt with scavenged wire. Music reaches the valley—until deer break from the trees and engines answer from the road.
He lowers the volume and raises his binoculars. Armed men are moving bound civilians toward a checkpoint. Then a broken frequency carries the voice of a woman he has spent three years teaching himself not to remember.
Three winters after the outbreak, a school gym can be a hospital, a ranch can depend on one repaired tractor, and a hydroelectric dam can decide which settlement has light. Cars still start when someone finds fuel. Towers still carry voices when someone climbs them. Old quarantine notices fade beneath newer orders.
The story crosses a fictional stretch of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho: river valleys, alpine lakes, ranch country, ski towns, rail yards, silos, and an industrial corridor where the largest concentrations of infected remain sealed. What still works has become more important than any boundary on an old map.
The Pact grew from militias, security committees, predatory officials, and people who recognized collapse as a chance to rule. It controls dams, fuel, farmland, roads, and repeaters. At its checkpoints, private radios go into confiscation bins, food cards are stamped by rank, prisoners become “registered labor,” and a neighbor’s harvest becomes a “requisition.”
Its patrols coordinate, cover one another, and contain the infected when that serves them. Clean language makes organized theft sound administrative. The same working systems that keep communities alive also let the Pact move orders, troops, food, and fear between them.
Before the collapse, he serviced radio towers and emergency repeaters and volunteered on search-and-rescue calls. The work taught him mountains, weather, first aid, and the patience to repair equipment high above the ground. It did not make him a soldier. Everything he knows about violence came later, badly.
During the first year, he restored a regional relay for what looked like a local defense committee. That committee became the Pact; his network now coordinates its checkpoints and transfers. He has since traded technical work without choosing a side, calling isolation prudence because responsibility is harder to name.
Mia, his partner before the outbreak, worked in county emergency communications. Separated during the first quarantines, she survived by connecting people under pressure. Her voice now moves through Free Band, a covert network of farmers, medics, railroad workers, couriers, radio operators, deserters, and independent communities.
He wants the network to lead him back to her. Mia needs him to rebuild it for everyone. Love does not erase the missing years or his neutrality: he sees someone he wants to pull from danger, while she sees a technician whose absence helped dangerous people keep their grip. Their reunion begins with work and disagreement.
There is no resurrection or supernatural strength. A neuroinvasive illness strips away pain response, judgment, inhibition, and self-preservation. The young and newly infected can be fast; injuries remain real; bodies fail, but often later than fear expects.
One infected can be managed by someone prepared. A crowd in a narrow room, or one drawn by a gunfight, is different. Animals do not turn. Deer, dogs, horses, wolves, and bears remain themselves—sometimes a warning, sometimes another complication in a landscape no faction fully controls.
The battered solar receiver holds incomplete maps, intercepted traffic, recordings, and music carried out of the old world. A song can steady his hands or turn a detachable speaker into a lure. It can also mask approaching footsteps and tell every infected or patrol nearby where to look.
The radio begins as shelter from grief, becomes the thread leading to Mia, and then a tactical tool and shared language. Rebuilding the network means isolated communities can hear one another without asking the Pact for permission—the same infrastructure, placed in different hands.
This playable slice runs from the fire tower to relay K-12. Along the way, the solar radio, noise, infected, and a Pact convoy establish the systems shaping the wider journey. Repairing the relay brings the first Free Band transmission through a network the technician once helped build.
He crosses the ridge to identify the voice calling his old rescue sign. When it proves to be Mia, her warning sends him farther: dismantle the Pact’s communications system and return its reach to the communities living beneath it.
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MOUSE Move the pointer to aim. Click for a quick attack or hold for a heavy attack. Use the upper-right −/+ buttons, or hover over that strip and scroll, to adjust music in 5% steps. On the map, drag to pan and scroll to zoom.
TOUCH Use the inner area of the left stick to walk without spending stamina; push farther to run or sprint. ACTION interacts, and STRIKE attacks. The quick buttons toggle the flashlight and music or open radio, map, and pack; speaker volume is available inside the radio.
Everything you did since the last checkpoint is lost.
"Ridge Seven, if you can hear me: the fire tower isn't safe. Don't go back. Look east for the red aviation light on the next ridge. This is Mia."
The relay you once built for the people who became the Pact has returned Mia's voice—and a warning that your refuge is no longer safe.