Welded Shut

Adam Rourke, 32, is an only child. His parents are dead and left him the house and money he never touched. Before the cold he was the man who helped: he paid a poor student's tuition, lent money to the whole street, fixed the district's water pump twice. Then the temperature fell past anything anybody has a word for, and his neighbours ate him. He has been sent back one day to live it again. The door is the story. He has one day to weld it shut, and forty neighbours will be standing in the snow outside, in a group chat at 999 plus, remembering a version of him they have not lived yet. Inside: counted heat, counted water, counted fuel, a steel door with one integrity value that falls when it is struck. Outside: forty people who were not evil at the start and are becoming what the cold makes them. The game tracks the outside temperature in Fahrenheit, the inside temperature, the days of stores, and the sound of the door at three in the morning, and it asks how long the steel can hold and what the player is willing to become in order to stay behind it.