ANTIZA

Noise has a tail. Your meter drifts up as you move and falls slowly when you stop — you keep ringing for a second or two afterward. Slow down before you need to be quiet, not when. The bar shows exactly what the building hears of you, live — no smoothing, no lag. The dashed line across it is the fail line: cross it and MAXIMUM begins counting. It comes down slowly after a crowd because the crowd itself is still settling, not because the dial is lagging.

Nothing in this building switches on. Sirens spin up, the speaker array climbs into its wrong frequency, ringing phones swell, screams and breaking glass have an attack. A sound that just started is not yet at full strength — which means a pulled alarm buys you a moment before it becomes a beacon, and a distant noise growing louder is a warning you can act on.

Loud places don't hurt you instantly. A red arc closes around you as exposure builds — pass through quickly and you'll barely feel it. Linger and it reaches full bite. Step back into quiet and the arc unwinds.

So run the loud ground, walk the quiet. This is the opposite of the instinct. Creeping across a room full of speakers costs you far more than crossing it quickly: you stay silent, and you dissolve anyway. Dash through, then ease off where it's quiet and let the arc unwind. One exception, and it matters: never dash through people. Speakers punish you for staying; crowds punish you for moving. Loud empty ground is for running; loud crowded ground is for creeping, or for going around.

Your circle grows with speed. At a sprint it reaches roughly four times further than it does standing still, sweeping in people who were nowhere near you at a walk. That is the trap: running is how you cover ground, and also how you gather a crowd into your wake.

It only comes down once you are clear — and then slowly. Nothing settles while anyone is still inside the circle, however much you slow down. Break clear and then stand dead still; stopping calms it far faster than moving, and running away from a crowd keeps it climbing. Pin the meter at the top and MAXIMUM begins: a second or so of grace, then it starts tearing through your stability — gently at first, worse the longer you stay pinned. Drop back below the line and it stops. You will be damaged, not lost.

Three things worth finding. The front-of-house desk out in the hall kills every speaker in the building at once — the biggest single thing you can do to survive the night, and the feedback shriek tells every ear exactly where you are standing. Ear defenders in the back of house muffle what sound does to you for over a minute. The freight lift drops you from the concourse straight to the dock, skipping the back of house entirely, in eleven seconds of grinding steel that everything hears.

And if the sprinklers trip — half a minute in which the building is nothing but white noise and the chorus cannot pick you out of it. Do not spend it standing still.

Act — the button on the right appears near things you can use: smash speakers to kill sound, pull alarms to lure hordes away from you, open doors, talk to survivors. When one of the turned is on top of you, the button becomes SHOVE — a loud, desperate two seconds of life. Your serum batch (rolled fresh each night) shapes how you move, how quiet you run, how hard you shove, or how fast you recover.

Survivors can be escorted out. They slow you down and make noise — and some carry their own gifts: a steward's keys, a strong shoulder, a calming voice. Three of them are out there tonight. Which three changes every run.

No two nights are the same. The venue is rebuilt every run — doors, rooms, routes, the sealed shutter itself. Each night also carries its own condition: oversold crowds, failing lights, self-tripping alarms, or a silence so total that everything hears everything. And somewhere on the floor is a live wireless mic: thrown, it screams wherever it lands.

The turned are not all alike. The big dark ones hear across half a room. The small bright ones close fast — you can still outrun them at a full sprint, but not at a walk. Learn them fast.

Routes south change every night. The back of house might be twin routes, parallel service lanes, a loud open atrium ringed by a quiet corridor, or switchback stairs hiding a service chute. Read the signs at the doors: blue chevrons mark quiet, red mark fast and loud. All routes reach the loading dock — where a sealed shutter waits, and sometimes a second one welded shut.

The speech can be skipped. Phase I exists to teach you the room. If you already know it, tap the objective box in the top-left and the night starts immediately.

Two switches on the title screen. DIFFICULTY changes how fast you come apart, how far the turned hear and how hard they hit — EASY gives you room to learn the building, HARD assumes you already know it. Your grade at the end accounts for which you chose.

Ears first, map optional. A minimap can be switched on from the title screen — it draws the building and everything making noise, but it will never show you the infected. With it off, the edge arrows are your only guide.

How the arrows work. Glowing arrows at the edge of the screen point toward every loud thing beyond your sight — red for speakers, amber for alarms and screams, blue for ringing phones, green for the suite's tone. The infected make no arrow until they shriek. When your heart starts pounding and the screen pulses red, something has found you.

The world is loud on its own. Bottles shatter if you run through them, phones ring for the dead, alarms and screams pull the chorus in tides. Use the noise — every ringing phone is a lure you didn't have to pay for. And the stabilization suite still sings its session tone: it will calm you, and it will call them.