Diariet
Highlights
- Five shifts processing incoming tips and incident reports for a municipal office that officially handles nuisance complaints and unofficially exists to keep Djupet's cult off the front page
- Four destinations — dismiss, file as known, flag for follow-up, escalate — governed by an accumulating, occasionally contradictory guideline stack, same shape as Retur's regulations
- The mechanical twist: escalating always costs Insyn (insight/notice), correct or not — being right doesn't make you invisible
- Twenty-five reports, several citing real events from Djupet's own event pool — a bleeding IKEA LACK table, Göran accidentally added to the cult's Discord, the Värnhemstorget pigeons, Turning Torso rotating — reframed as outside tips from residents who saw a fragment of something they don't understand
- The player is deliberately never given the full picture. Four distinct endings (two win tiers, two loss tiers) confirm or complicate that, but never resolve it
- Real generated desk photography for intro, win, and loss screens — a fluorescent-lit municipal office, a corkboard map, a ceiling water stain shaped like a coastline that changes between screens
- Directly descended from Retur's engine (routeLetter/nextDay → routeReport/nextShift), same near-black palette as Djupet and Retur, its own accent color (cold institutional cyan) to mark it as a different desk in the same universe
A third desk in the same city. Djupet puts you inside a Lovecraftian cult in Malmö; Retur puts you at a dead-letter office quietly aware of what it’s adjacent to. Diariet is a level further out again — you never see the cult, never see the dungeon, never see anything directly. You just process the paperwork other people generate when they brush up against it and don’t understand what they saw.
Five shifts, one report at a time: dismiss it as mundane, file it as an already-known phenomenon, flag it for your own team’s follow-up, or escalate it upward and lose all visibility into what happens next. Guidelines accumulate and contradict shift over shift, exactly like Retur’s regulation stack — but Diariet adds one real mechanical difference: choosing to escalate always raises your Insyn (insight, or notice), whether or not it was the correct call. The rules sometimes require you to escalate. Doing so is never free. That’s the whole tension of the job: being right doesn’t make you invisible.
Several reports cite real events from Djupet’s own event log rather than inventing new ones — the same bleeding IKEA table, the same accidentally-added Discord member, the same staring pigeons at Värnhemstorget — reframed as what an outside witness would actually see and report: a fragment, not the full shape. The player is told upfront they’ll never get the complete picture. The four endings (two ways to survive the week, two ways not to) confirm that promise rather than break it.
See /malmo for all three games together.