It is 1998. You are the night-shift clerk, and the job is simple: play Solitaire against the machine until the quota is met. Payroll is your score. Every third night is a performance review. The building locks from the outside at midnight. For your safety.
SOLITAIRE.EXE is Klondike solitaire rebuilt as a roguelike. You are not trying to clear the board. You are trying to hit a score target before the deck burns out. Sending a card home pays chips. Every scoring move HEATS your chain multiplier. Drawing from the deck COOLS it back down. That single tension, bank the points now or push the chain hotter and risk it, is the whole game. Nine deals a week. Miss the quota and the shift is over.
Between shifts, the PLUGIN VENDOR opens. Spend your payroll on programs that install onto floppy disks and rewrite the rules. HIMEM.SYS multiplies your whole chain when you finish a suit. WINRAR.TRIAL triples your first move after a recycle (your trial expired 400 nights ago). LOTUS_123.WK4 scores every fourth move four times over. There are 56 plugins, 7 of them legendary and never sold, plus card seals, consumables, and floppy-disk decks that reshape the whole run. Stack the right build and one shift pays six figures.
Every third night an unauthorized process starts. AUDIT.EXE voids your hearts. BSOD.SYS throttles your chain. SPOOL32.EXE hides your score until you clock out. Twenty reviews on file, three per run, each a boss that breaks a different scoring rule for the night. Beat one and MGMT files your severance package. A reward. Probably.
There is no monster. There is a memo. "Do not look at the CRT after-image. Do not name it. -MGMT." The janitor, j4nit0r_77, messages you on OFFICE PAL 98 to warn you about the vending machine on 3, and about the last clerk who got real good at this, then real quiet. When your deck dies, something in the machine sometimes reaches out and gives you one more card. It takes pity. You never asked it to. Climb eight corporate ranks and HR says you are part of the building now. There is no day shift. There never was.
- Play real Klondike solitaire scored like a slot machine: chips times chain, banked or burned on every single move.
- Build a run from 56 cursed plugins, card seals, consumables, and floppy-disk decks. No two shifts pay the same.
- Beat 20 performance-review bosses, each one breaking a different rule of how scoring works.
- Boot the week from 9 different SYSTEM files, each rewriting the run's rules before you deal a card: no recycle, a 40-card deck where 10s are kings, a chain that only halves, a wage paid in bonuses only, a seven-shift crunch week, and more.
- Uncover SUCCESSION.DOC: the clerk before you left a week unfinished. Restore their shift report from the Recycle Bin, take their seed, and work their exact schedule, reviews, and final hand to the number they left behind.
- Climb 8 corporate ranks across every run you will ever play, unlocking contracts, card backs, and the redacted HR incident files. Your cards scar, and the building keeps a personnel file on every one of them.
- Push your luck at SLOTS.EXE, feed THE TERMINAL, punch the monkey, wave at BUDD-E and unlock his desk pets. Regret most of it.
- A diegetic Windows 98 desktop: real BIOS boot, pop-up ads that blast their own tinny MIDI jingles, a working Recycle Bin, and a Blue Screen that means you are fired.
- A reactive soundtrack across 38 electronic genres that shifts up a gear as your chain heats and drops the bass when you smash the quota.
- 29 achievements, daily and weekly seeded shifts, the nine-review GAUNTLET, and endless OVERTIME for the ones who cannot go home.
Clock in. Beat the quota. Do not get TERMINATED.
SOLITAIRE.EXE contains no jump scares. It contains a job.
