Planned Release Date: November 2026

About This Game

THE LAST DESK ON THE SEABED

• The surface routes are closed, and every town on the shelf gets its mail the same way: sealed into a cargo hold and towed out through the dark. You are the clerk. You have a window, a scale, a drawer of stamps, a handbook of towns — and a landlord.

Four weeks. Four rent days. Nobody is coming down here to help you sort it.

WEIGH IT. PRICE IT. STAMP IT.

A customer sets a parcel in the window. Read the label, find the town in the handbook, put the parcel on the scale. Route and weight give you a fee — and the fee is paid in stamps, one to three of them, summing exactly. $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, with the larger denominations only reaching you as the weeks go on. Overcharge or undercharge and it comes out of your evening.

NOT EVERY PARCEL IS HONEST

Smugglers work this coast. Some labels name towns that do not exist — if it is not in the handbook, refuse it, and the service pays you for the catch.

From the second week the forgeries get better. The address is perfect; the only thing wrong is the day's seal, a small rune that changes every morning and matches nothing you can guess. Wave a forgery through and you lose $100 and your clean streak with it. Turn away honest customers too often and that costs you as well.

THE HOLD HAS TO HANG LEVEL

At the end of the counter is the hold: a grid inside a paper-fish body, strung from a single beam. Every parcel you accept has to fit — irregular shapes, awkward corners, no second trip. And it has to balance. A spirit level on the hold shows the list; keep the weight even from side to side and the service pays a trim bonus on every cell you filled. Let it lean and the bonus is simply gone.

Then it gets worse.

• Glass parcels cannot sit beside anything heavy, or they arrive as gravel.

• Valuables have to be logged in the register — and the label never states the weight, so you have to measure before you decide.

• One parcel a day is marked urgent. Stow it before you call the next customer and there is extra money in it — but opening the hold mid-shift breaks the rhythm you built.

• A night current mirrors the entire grid.

• One morning the body splits into twin tanks, and a parcel has to fit inside one of them.

Six mechanics arrive one at a time — on days 3, 5, 6, 9, 12 and 13 — so you are never learning two at once, and never done learning.

READ THE MORNING BULLETIN

Every shift opens with the day's paper, and the paper is the rules. A storm puts every fee up by half. The Rose Route rate rises today only, and the old rate counts as underpayment. The small stamps did not come in on the morning boat, so spend what you have carefully. Two forgeries are expected this shift — check every town.

RENT IS DUE

You are paid by the cell, bonused for a full clean hold, and fined for everything you let slip. Operating costs come off every night. Rent lands on days 7, 14, 21 and 28 — $250, then $450, then $700, then $1,000 — and it climbs faster than the work pays. Miss it and you have three days to find the money, with the market locked while you look. Miss it again and you are out.

Between shifts the market is open. A better cassette lining pays you more for every cell you fill. A tip line raises what a caught forgery is worth from $10 to $25. An extra allowance lets you refuse one more customer without losing money on it. Every purchase is money that is not going toward the rent.

FEATURES

• A 28-day run with a rent clock that climbs faster than your income

• Stamp-exact pricing — one to three stamps, summed precisely, no change given

• Two layers of forgery hunting — the handbook of towns, then the day's seal

• A packing puzzle with weight — fit the hold, then balance it on the beam

• Six mechanics on a drip feed, each arriving on its own day

• Daily events — storms, mirrored holds, twin tanks, stamp shortages, tariff changes

• An upgrade market between shifts, paid out of the same till as the rent

• Misprinted bills you can spend today, or hoard in the album for a collector whose offer grows every day you wait

• Hand-made pixel art — paper fish, brass scales, and four coloured routes into the dark