Some Strange Day is a browser-based comedy RPG in the spirit of West of Loathing, with the tech-satire tone of Silicon Valley and Office Space. You are a Level-1 help desk technician at Pinnacle Solutions Inc. during the week a company-mandated AI called ARCA goes live. The AI is more than advertised, the building is quietly haunted, and nobody is concerned. Your performance review is Friday.
Play it live — it runs in any modern browser and saves locally.
Why it exists
I wanted to build a game where the writing is the mechanics. There’s no combat: every encounter resolves through dialogue skill-checks against four stats — Tech, Charm, Occult, and Bureaucracy — and the absurd office equipment you’ve collected. The whole game spans Monday to Friday, and as ARCA grows more powerful each day, the office UI itself degrades from sterile corporate blue toward eldritch chaos.
Highlights
- A five-story office building of 22 explorable rooms, from the parking garage to the floor nobody talks about.
- Over 400 dialogue nodes across 8 NPCs, IT tickets that double as quests, and 5 distinct endings driven by your dominant stats, key items, and a handful of binary choices.
- ARCA’s name expands to a different acronym every single time it appears — a running gag enforced by a content registry so it is never the same twice, and never acknowledged by anyone.
- Three flavors of skill-check: gated, attemptable (with funny-failure branches), and hidden item checks — all color-coded in the UI.
- Every pixel of environment art is drawn procedurally on Canvas 2D — the game ships zero image assets.
- 154 tests over the engine, content integrity, and UI systems.
Technical approach
Vanilla JavaScript ES modules with no framework: a Canvas 2D renderer for the world, DOM overlays for UI, and an event-bus architecture keeping modules isolated. All game text — roughly 9,000 lines of JSON — lives in content files the engine interprets, so writing and tuning never touch engine code. Each dialogue node carries a non-rendered context field explaining its narrative intent, a convention that lets AI collaborators review and extend the writing without breaking tone. Saves live in localStorage; pushes to main deploy straight to Vercel.
