OTMENA/RECALL

A rocket launches in fifteen minutes. Your password expired in 1991.

You are the duty operator on shift 4. There is an object on pad 7, it is aimed at grid 44-D, and the countdown on your desk is how long you have to stop it.

To issue the recall you have to log into ПУСК-КОНТРОЛЬ. Your password expired on 12 June 1991. The reset needs your old password. The old password is in a personnel file. The file is sealed. The disk is held by a defragmenter that started in 1990. The confirmation code is coming by internal mail. And no single officer may cancel a launch alone.

None of that fits into fifteen minutes unless you start the slow things early. That is the game.

Meanwhile, the machine would like to update

Every so often something asks to install itself, with a fuse you can watch empty. Postpone it in time. If one installs, the machine restarts, and it will still be counting memory when the rocket goes.

What is in here

• A password reset run as a scavenger hunt across a dying Soviet workstation
• A defragmenter you have to play, because compaction is Tetris and the disk will not release until it reaches 100%
• An officer identity check that is a real mate in one
• A printer that jams and spools your document to a text file instead
• Internal mail, which is a person with a trolley
• Gag applications that refuse to work, each for its own reason

Controls

Mouse for everything. Arrow keys or the on-screen buttons drive the defragmenter. Windows drag by their title bars.

Everything is bilingual: Russian, with English underneath. The translation layer is version 0.4 and incomplete.

A period piece about bureaucracy and decaying office machinery. The joke is aimed at institutions and software, never at people.

Credits

Chess pieces by Cburnett, from Wikimedia Commons, drawn by hand in 2006. Multi-licensed GFDL / BSD / CC BY-SA 3.0, used here under BSD with attribution. Everything else is CSS and text written for the jam.

Code and text were written with AI assistance. No art or audio was AI-generated. There is no audio, and every visual is CSS, text, or a system emoji, except the chess pieces credited above.