The book stops at the fence. The game is the night it won't narrate.
Struck from the record
ClassificationOpen · for press
StatusReleased · 2026
PriceFree — no account
FormatPlays in browser
Tab 01 · Summary
For eleven years, Margaret Vane sat at a government records desk and decided what the country was allowed to see — and, more quietly, what could go unwatched. She drew the blind spots herself. Then she reported a ledger she was never meant to read, and by morning she had been struck from every register that ever held her name.
Filed Under No One is two halves of one story: a novel that walks her to the fence and stops — and a top-down stealth game that is the night she goes back in, crossing the building she used to run to recover the only proof she ever existed.
She kept the country's secrets. The country kept one — about her.
FUNO-77 / MV
Tab 02 · The Subject
Margaret Vane
Twenty-seven; eleven years at the records desk. She maps the blind spots of others and never once turned the lamp on her own.
Identity withheld
Photographed from behind. She is never shown facing the room.
The Director
The one figure who never leaves his post, who still watches his own door in the dark at the end of the last night — the only man who would know her if he turned around. The game never shows you whether he does.
The novel walks her to the fence and lays down its pen. The game is the chapter the file refuses to write — playable.
The keeper. Margaret at the records desk — the floor-plan above the lamp is a level you will cross.
Stay in the dark and you are a rumour.
FUNO-77 / MV
Tab 03 · Exhibits — gameplay
EX.1Calm · thread the cones
EX.2Alert · seen in full light
EX.3Suspicious · a head turns
EX.4Knock · pull the patrol
EX.5Evasion · the sweep
EX.6Read a vision cone
Tab 04 · Operation — how it plays
Pure stealth. No combat, no weapons, no health bar.
01Light is the whole game. Guards see in hard wedges of light, line-of-sight checked tile by tile; corners block sight. To win, you are simply never seen.
02The shadow rule. Step onto a shadow tile and a guard staring straight at you cannot see you. Binary, legible, ruthless.
03One detection meter. It fills in under a second of unbroken sight and drains the instant you break it. Fill it and you're taken — no second chances.
04Sound vs sight. Sound only ever sends a guard to look; only being seen raises the alarm. A knock lures a patrol; a careless run gives you away.
CALM — the patrol keeps its pattern. SUSPICIOUS — a cone clipped you; a head turns. HUNTING — seen in full light; the floor goes loud, and it knows the dark too.
Tab 05 · On the record — sound & look
Sound
Entirely procedural — every sound synthesised live in code, even the menu music. The floor plays in silence; sound marks change — papery footsteps, a rising "?" chirp, a two-voice "!" stab, and a heartbeat tempo-locked to the detection meter.
Look
Drawn in code, in the playfield: no textures, no sprite sheets, no loaded images. Dark grids, pale cones, true-black shadow, one rationed amber signal — of a piece with the novel's cover. The form is the theme.
Erased on paper. Returning in person.
The handler. The only man who would know her if he turned around.FUNO-77 / MV
Tab 06 · Minute sheet — the facts
DeveloperDS Laboratory — a one-person studio, London
DS Laboratory is a one-person studio in London. Filed Under No One — its engine, its prose, its levels — was designed, written, and directed to one standard by one person, David Silva, with AI carrying out much of the execution under that direction. The studio states this plainly: the decisions, the testing, and the bar are one author's.
