Saboteur - The Protocol

SABOTEUR: THE PROTOCOL
"End of the night, Lazarus. Dawn's here. Clearing the logs."
You are Dawn. A saboteur. Tonight, you run the Protocol.
Lazarus is the most powerful financial company on Earth. Buried deep in their systems are the debt records of millions of ordinary people — loans, balances, chains. Your mission is simple and absolute: wipe them. All of them.
This is not a shooter. This is not a brawler. Saboteur: The Protocol is a dark, atmospheric puzzle game built on one core principle: nothing is random. Everything leaves a trace.

THE GAME
Infiltrate four layers of Lazarus security using nothing but your eyes, your mind, and a notebook full of observations. Every clue is hidden in the environment. Every puzzle rewards careful thinking over trial and error. You are not here to guess — you are here to deduce.
Dawn's Notebook tracks everything you discover: wear patterns, behavioral traces, file contents, personnel details. The answer is always there. You just have to look.

LEVEL 1 — RESIDUAL ACCESS
The data annex. A locked safe. A keypad worn by thousands of repetitions.
Three digits are heavily scratched. One barely touched. Someone typed this code every single day for years. Muscle memory doesn't lie — but the order matters. Think like them. Use what they left behind. Crack the safe, retrieve the keycard, and get through the door.

LEVEL 2 — CREDENTIAL DRIFT
The security corridor. A terminal. A power grid with too many breakers and only one right answer.
Log into the system. Explore the files. The wiring diagram is in there — if you know what to look for. Find which circuit controls the cameras. Cut it. Then move.
LEVEL 3 — PROTOCOL OVERRIDE
The operations center. Badge readers. Network nodes. A security architect named Dr. Sarah Chen who left more behind than she realized.
Clone a badge. Map a network. Layer by layer, dismantle what Lazarus calls protection. Social engineering, terminal commands, and one whiteboard diagram stand between you and the server room.

LEVEL 4 — THE PAYLOAD
The server room. The target rack. The end of the Protocol.
Log in. Clear the local logs. And then — a warning. The debt records sync to a second location. Unknown. Unreachable from here. Dawn plants a traffic sniffer, waits, and captures an encoded destination. Decode it. Purge it. Finish what you started.
But before you leave — plant the reverse shell. Because Tier 2 is still out there.

LEVEL 5 — HOME BASE
The setting shifts completely. You're no longer inside Lazarus. You're back in Dawn's bunker — his home base. The reverse shell you planted on the server at the end of Level 4 is still active, and now it's time to use it.
The twist: The archive-07 node turns out to be a honeypot. The moment you try to connect archive-07.lazarus.internal, your IP gets exposed. A pulsing red WARNING screen takes over: "YOUR IP HAS BEEN EXPOSED — LAZARUS COUNTERMEASURES ACTIVE". Dawn reacts: "Hack... it was a honeypot server. I need to wipe all the evidence."

The Final: remains a surprise.

FOR PLAYERS WHO LIKE
Obra Dinn. Tenet. Mr. Robot. Papers, Please. Games that trust you to think.
The Protocol is not over. It never was.

FEATURES
Atmospheric cartoon noir visual style
Slow-burn deduction puzzles with no brute-force solutions
Dawn's Notebook — a living log of every clue you find
Internal monologue from Dawn that reacts to your choices
Immersive terminal interface with real Unix-style commands
Ambient sound design: electrical hums, server noise, distant drips
A handcrafted narrative that rewards attention to detail