Survival

You woke starving under a dead sun, knowing only that you were sent here to end this world. First, survive it.

You wake in the desert as a speck of black ooze — a living weapon seeded on Earth to end it, though you've forgotten how, or why. Survive the sun, evolve, steal a shape, and infiltrate a world that has a secret agency built to erase things exactly like you.

Your ship crashed on an alien world. Thirteen survivors, dwindling resources, and something watching from the treeline. Build a colony — or don't survive long enough to regret it.

Your idea is fine. Your network isn't. Welcome to San Francisco.

You've landed at SFO with a duffel bag, a half-baked deck, and 90 days of personal runway. The startup is almost beside the point — the real game is the people. Charm a jaded ex-Stripe PM into co-founding. Survive a hike-pitch with a vibes-based angel. Don't let the YC alum scoop you. Land a term sheet before you're broke.

Six strangers at your gate, a Combine toll due at dawn, and nine flame rounds left in the box.

They still say your name quietly out here — the Ashwake gunslinger, the one with the burning bullets. Eleven people sleep behind your wall at Mile 47, and nine years of unopened ruins are waiting up the road. Scavenge, build, and grow the settlement through five tiers. Fights run round by round with no move list. Die, and the corridor starts over from nothing.

You have food for four days and a knife made for deer.

A virus hits Pennsylvania on a Tuesday morning and you wake up with four cans of food, a gallon of water, a hunting knife, and a dog who won't stop growling at the window. Get out of Hollow Ridge, get into the mountains, and find somewhere worth putting walls around.

You should have gone to the beach. Now stay alive until 6:14 AM — and drag as many of them out with you as you can.

Eight seniors, one postcard cabin, spring break at Hollow Lake. Four men wanted for murder walked away from an overturned prison transport nine miles up the ridge road — and the one who does the talking has a very particular hatred for blonde cheerleaders. Sunrise is at 6:14 AM.

One hour. One body. You don't get to choose what it's for.

One hour decides a life. You arrive inside it — already committed, already late — and the world tells you the single thing this life is for. You don't choose it. You can't trade it. One body, no reloads, and walking out clean is rare enough to be a trophy.

They don't kill you because you won't stay dead. Dry out, stand up, and walk out of the mountain.

You are Naida — maybe the last of your kind — held in an under-salted tank on Sub-Level 4 of a black-budget lab buried in the Colorado Rockies. You heal from almost anything, which is exactly why the tests never stop. Hoard strength, learn the building, and remember what salt tastes like.

You're the only one who's seen this before — now prove it, before the last road out of town stops mattering.

A retired doctor and former detective is the only one who recognizes the swollen lymph nodes and blackening skin for what they are: the Black Death, loose in a modern town that refuses to believe it. Treat the sick, trace the source, and seal Ashbrook before the plague finds the road out.

They took the ship in eleven minutes. Keeping people alive is going to take a lot longer.

A decorated combat medic works triage in a hidden infirmary while pirates strip a luxury starliner deck by deck. You can't save everyone. You'll try anyway.

The footage that saves your channel is the footage where the house has its hands on you.

You and your co-hosts came to Ravensbrook Manor for one viral night of paranormal content. The house that's been waiting has other appetites. Keep the cameras rolling, keep the crew together, and last until dawn — if the clip doesn't claim you first.

The world ended while you were folding towel swans. Now 300 souls on a tall ship expect you to keep smiling.

You're Amy Wilson, concierge aboard a five-masted luxury clipper in the Caribbean, when the world ashore starts to die. Keep the plague out of the cabins, ration what's left, and outlast the billionaires, officers and crew fighting to control the last safe ship at sea.

Your body is failing, the building is lying to you, and every blink lets it take one more step.

You are the last surviving subject of an unlicensed insomnia trial, 216 hours past your final sleep. Something in clinic scrubs is walking the halls of the Halcyon Sleep Institute, and it only moves when your eyes are closed.

Ninety miles, high summer, and a purse that only pays if you're still standing — so don't tap, don't fall, and don't trust the boys at the water.

You're Ashley Grace, 21 — Nordic blonde, built like the heptathlete she used to be, and fully aware of what happens to the men's team when she smiles. Ninety miles of Rocky Mountain backcountry, animals that don't care about the cameras, and $750,000 that only pays to whoever's still standing on the extraction pad.

Six holds and you never touch the ground again. Keep something free.

You went out for six miles. At mile six, a root that wasn't there on the way out closes around your ankle. The forest doesn't want to eat you — it wants to know exactly what you are, limb by limb, and it will take you apart to find out.

Climb eighty floors out of the dark. Every death offers you the easy way back, and the easy way is what finishes you.

You wake on a black screen with three green options. Below you, eighty floors of a building that eats people. Above you, daylight. CONTINUE puts you back seconds before the thing that killed you — and every time you take the easy door, the tape rots a little further.