Every designated decision in Dead Load: The Visual Novel Game becomes evidence in your personal Agent dossier.
The important word is evidence.
A single choice may suggest how you approached one problem under one set of circumstances. It cannot establish everything about how you observe, reason, or act.
Your dossier develops from patterns.
Two Results from Every Decision
When you make your call, the game examines the decision in two different ways.
First, it compares your choice with Nick Stello’s. This contributes to your Nick-alignment record and measures how often you anticipate the decision Nick ultimately makes.
Second, the decision contributes evidence toward your ASSET Profile.
These results are related, but they are not identical. You can disagree with Nick and still demonstrate a valuable operational capability. Nick’s choice answers what he did. Your profile examines what your own pattern of decisions reveals.
The Five ASSET Dimensions
Your profile develops across five dimensions:
Attention
Do you notice details, inconsistencies, changes, and potential clues that others might overlook?
Synthesis
Can you connect separate pieces of information and recognize the larger pattern they form?
Strategy
Can you anticipate consequences, sequence actions, and select an approach suited to the larger objective?
Evaluation
Can you weigh competing explanations, risks, tradeoffs, and the reliability of the available evidence?
Targeting
Can you identify the decisive threat, opportunity, objective, or action within a complex situation?
Not every question measures all five dimensions equally. A decision designed to test Targeting may still provide secondary evidence about Strategy or Evaluation. As more decisions are recorded, the system gains a clearer picture of your demonstrated strengths.
From Profile to Mission Suitability
The eventual purpose of the ASSET Profile is not to assign a personality type.
It is to identify the kinds of missions for which your demonstrated abilities may be best suited.
A developing profile might suggest strength in areas such as:
- Investigation and intelligence analysis
- Pattern recognition
- Strategic planning
- Time-sensitive decision-making
- Threat assessment
- High-stakes judgment
Early results will necessarily remain preliminary. A dossier containing only a few decisions cannot support the same conclusions as one built across many chapters, situations, and mission types.
As the evidence grows, recommendations can become more specific—and may change.
Your Dossier Grows with the Story
Your Agent dossier is an operational record, not a permanent label. New decisions may reinforce an apparent strength, reveal a capability that had not previously appeared, or provide a more balanced picture of how you respond under pressure.
That is why your dossier begins with your first mission but is never truly finished.
Each decision adds another piece of evidence.
Each mission gives that evidence context.
And over time, the pattern begins to answer a question that goes beyond whether you think like Nick Stello:
LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR AGENT DOSSIER
What kind of Agent might you become?