Dead Air Directory

A first-person 2.5D switchboard thriller where telephone lines reshape a building.

Dead Air Directory is a first-person 2.5D switchboard thriller set during five after-hours shifts in a municipal telephone exchange. The building's internal lines remain active after every employee has left. Your task is to find the manual board, connect each waiting line to its specified destination, ring once, and return to the elevator without allowing the Listener to locate you. The world is rendered by a custom grid DDA raycaster. Walls are drawn column by column with perspective distance, side shading, material striping and fog. The switchboard, Archive, elevator, and Listener are depth-tested billboard objects. The deliberately flat figures belong to the world's visual logic instead of pretending to be polygonal models. Each night expands the routing sequence. Destinations include Archive 618, Lobby 203, Records 441, and Boiler 072. Correct routing makes the bell sound at the remote destination, pulling the Listener through the maze. A wrong route or an unpatched ring exposes the player's current position. Ordinary footsteps can also attract it at close range. Holding Shift produces slower quiet steps that do not update its sound target. The Listener is not teleported and does not receive the player's coordinates continuously. It maintains a target only after an audible event and follows a shortest traversable route through the map. Its movement becomes faster on later shifts. Contact ends the shift; failure can be restarted immediately without erasing campaign progression. Dead Air Directory includes pointer-lock movement, wall collision, raycast rendering, sprite occlusion, directional navigation, interactive switchboard controls, four physical routing destinations, multi-call shift state, procedural telephone and footstep audio, enemy pathfinding, failure and completion states, autosave, and campaign resume. It does not load remote images, scripts, audio, fonts, maps, or dialogue.