Most interactive stories ask the player to control the protagonist and determine what happens next.
Dead Load: The Visual Novel Game works differently.
Nick Stello has his own history, judgment, and reasons for acting. His decisions belong to him, and the story does not change according to a player’s preference. Instead, the game presents you with the same situation Nick faces—and asks you to make your call before he makes his.
You might be asked which threat Nick intends to address first, what detail he considers most important, or which course of action best serves the larger objective. You study the scene, examine the available evidence, and record your decision.
Then the story continues.
You discover what Nick does, why he does it, and whether your reasoning anticipated his.
Prediction, Not Control
This distinction is central to the Serial Book Game.
You are not choosing whether Nick turns left or right simply to create another branch in the plot. You are reading an established thriller while participating in the analysis beneath its action.
Every scene may contain useful evidence:
- Something Nick notices
- Something another character overlooks
- The physical arrangement of a location
- A contradiction in what someone says
- A threat that is less obvious than the others
- A detail whose importance becomes clear only later
The challenge is not merely to remember what happened. It is to determine what matters.
More Than a Right Answer
After making your decision, you learn whether it matches Nick’s. That comparison contributes to your Nick-alignment record and answers one of the game’s central questions:
How often do you think like Nick Stello?
But disagreement with Nick is not automatically failure.
A different decision may reveal another useful ability: careful observation, strong evaluation of risk, strategic thinking, pattern recognition, or an instinct for identifying the decisive objective. That evidence becomes part of your Agent dossier and helps develop your ASSET Profile.
The result is a game that operates on two levels.
You follow Nick’s story as it was meant to unfold. At the same time, your own decisions create a second story—the developing record of how you think when the answer is not yet known.
The Mission Ahead
Dead Load: The Visual Novel Game is currently undergoing invitation-only alpha testing. The story experience, decision system, and Agent dossier are being tested together because each depends upon the others.
When the game opens to more players, you will not determine who Nick Stello becomes.
You will discover how well you understand the man he already is.
Read the mission. Study the evidence. Make your call.
Can you think like Nick Stello?