Inner Datum

Your friends are already in the voice call. Somebody starts it, everyone else clicks in, and a rain-soaked clerical city appears on a board you are all looking at. It is a city with a records system that overwrites people, and four of you in a call deciding what to do about it.

Then the turn stops. It stops for all of you.

Inner Datum resolves a turn only once every player who owes a decision has made one. So the second before a door opens is not four people mashing keys — it is a conversation. Don't open it yet. I'm at four resolve and I want the doorway. Nobody watches a spinner while somebody else's animation plays. The pause is the game.

And then it goes wrong. Somebody drops to zero and they are not dead and not removed — they are Downed, prone on the tile they fell on, with a five-turn countdown everybody can see. It turns "I died" into "get to me". Any ally who reaches them spends their whole turn standing them back up at a quarter health. If the countdown runs out they are Erased: still on the map, no longer revivable.

It is not fast. The skill is tactical positioning and cooldown sequencing, not reflexes. It is built for one specific situation: friends already sitting in the same voice channel, one evening at a time.

What makes it interesting

• The turn resolves only when every player who owes a decision has made one — the pause is where the game actually happens
• Downed rather than dead: a five-turn countdown anyone can run to, turning a death into a rescue
• Combat is level-wide, exploration is free — nobody gets fifty quiet tiles while a friend is tanking
• An original setting: a rain-soaked clerical city and a records system that overwrites people
• Built to be played in a voice call you were already in, not a lobby you have to organise

Where it is

Inner Datum is playable, and fewer than ten people play it. There are no releases and no hosted instance — it runs locally for a small closed group while the setting and the systems settle. There is nothing to sign up to yet.