Game universes

Explore the connected worlds of GameStrategists and where the standalone ARG settings sit relative to them.

The Tide Protocol

The in-game text of Midnight Frequency and Room 404 still carries the name Tide Protocol: the first writes it as a perception experiment never publicly acknowledged, the second uses it as the title of its own related-files panel. No other work mentions it — Tide Sound Archives, Sunken City, Rust River and Eye of the Abyss contain not one occurrence, each with its own institution and its own years, so there is no homework to catch up on.

The Same Frequencies, Different Questions

A handful of numbers keep showing up in instrument readouts: 103.9 MHz is the radio that switches itself on in Midnight Frequency; 52.9 Hz appears in the ledgers of Rust River, Abyss Messenger and Last Online; 18.7 Hz is the hum under the lighthouse in Tide Sound Archives, and it is written into records in Sunken City, Abyss Messenger and Night Shift Rules too. They are the same kind of prop, not the same plot — each number answers only the question of the work it appears in.

One Name, Three Different Affairs

“Project Tide” means three different things in three works: in Tide Sound Archives it is the sonic experiment under the lighthouse; in Room 404 it is Genesis Tech’s project number GNS-404, shut down together with its equipment in a termination notice; in Last Online it is only a line reading "TIDE-07 not recovered" in an asset ledger, and the matching domain tide-lab.cn belongs to a Linyuan Laboratory deregistered in 2019. All three read like paperwork, yet they are not the same programme.

Lánchéng: Same Name, Different Cities

Two works each built a coastal city called Lánchéng: Tide Sound Archives has the lighthouse district after the 2003 typhoon, Sunken City has the 1962 pressure chamber and the Chen family’s lamp keepers. Both state in their own "related works" panel that the city belongs only to that work, so these are two cities sharing a name rather than one city investigated twice. Elsewhere a caller in Midnight Frequency says she lives in Lánchéng, four hundred kilometres from Linwan — that one is just a place name in someone else’s mouth.

A Label We Stopped Using

We used to file Midnight Frequency, Tide Sound Archives, Room 404, Last Online and Night Shift Rules under one label: the Abyss Archives universe. Those four characters never appeared in any game’s own text, and two of those five titles — Tide Sound Archives and Room 404 — now state in their own "related works" panel that each story stands alone, so we no longer group them that way. Two older guides still carry the old wording; the sections above take precedence.

Xinyuan Smelting Group

A conglomerate spanning smelting and psychological assessment. The Xinyuan Smelting Factory was the group’s founding industry, but over time the corporation delved into darker territory — including writing miners down as “voluntarily departed.” The name “Xinyuan Smelting Group” appears in a commendation notice on Rust River’s town-government site.

Midnight Frequency

Urban legend · 2–3 hours, one night

On a typhoon night in 1998, Linwan Station read the list of people still unaccounted for on Night Watch. The master tape cuts at the sixteenth name. In 2026, the host’s son receives the reel marked “03:12 / Do Not Air.” 9 chapters, 9 puzzles, 30 clues, 8 intercepts, 4 endings, 2–3 hours.

Tide Protocol