Your first assignment as the demon castle's newest HR clerk: fill in the personnel file of Gardan, captain of the gate guard, a thousand years in service and given up on by twelve predecessors as impossible to evaluate. Every interview request comes back unopened, yet the lamp on your walk home is always freshly changed. He is a man who translates tenderness into guard rosters, and season by HR season, you slowly learn to read him.
Hired into the demon castle's HR office, you are handed your first assignment: fill in the personnel file of Gardan, captain of the gate guard, a thousand years in service. The file holds a single line, Unrateable. Send twelve interview request forms and twelve come back unopened, and at the mere mention of paperwork his word count drops by half. And yet, strange things. On the mornings after you work late, the dead lamp in the HR corridor has been changed, and on days of heavy rain his patrol route happens to overlap your walk home. He is a man who converts kindness and worry alike into guard deployments. There is no countdown here, no time limit, no appointed ending. Time flows only by HR season, and one more returned form settles onto the pile. The imp applicant who fails the interview and lines up again the next day, two night-meal chits left wordlessly in the canteen, one extra chair that appears in front of the guard post: such small things become the story, and over the turning seasons you slowly learn why his evaluation has stayed blank for a thousand years. What finally fills that blank, nobody knows yet.
- Not a game about saving the world. Hirings, interviews, and evaluations pile up into something neither of you can name, a relentlessly clerical slow burn.
- Two things are measured. The HR ledger, thickening with every document you process, and the regard of the castle's demons, who slowly come to trust the clerk from HR.
- He memorizes every face in the castle, yet refuses to be left in any record himself, and the reason is the one thing he does not want found out.
Not a game about saving the world. Hirings, interviews, and evaluations pile up into something neither of you can name, a relentlessly clerical slow burn.
