PROBATION

PROBATION is a turn-based grid roguelike where the dungeon is a startup. Four carpeted floors of desks, meeting enemies and office supplies, then a fifth floor where THE ALL-HANDS is waiting.

Nothing moves until you do. Each arrow press (or WASD) moves you one tile; bumping a meeting attacks it with your equipped supply. Walk over a stapler, chair, printer or abandoned cold brew to pick it up: the strongest supply in your bag becomes your weapon. The green HR door descends a floor, and each floor is bigger, more crowded and shorter on patience.

Enemies are recurring meetings that step towards you and hit you when adjacent; there are three flavours of them plus a 26 HP ALL-HANDS boss, and about one attack in eight is a critical reply-all. You can fight every meeting on a floor or sneak around them, but the green HR door is always on the far side of the carpet and the building gets more crowded as you climb.

Dying ends the run, never your career: after every run you sign one promotion for +max HP, +damage, healing on each new floor, or a score bonus per cancelled meeting. Promotions are stored in your browser and carry into the next run, so the office slowly becomes survivable.

Made with pygame-ce, built for the browser with pygbag and WebAssembly. Runs entirely in the page, no server, no install. A run takes about 5-8 minutes; the message log is where the jokes live.