崇祯直聘：明末官场沉浮模拟器 Survive the fall of a dynasty

Your story starts in the first year of the Chongzhen reign, and your birth decides everything. A poor scholar who passed the exams after ten years of study gets posted to a ruined county in the central plains: on his first day in office, the treasury turns out to be empty. A hereditary military family in Xuanfu has lost its eldest son in Liaodong; what reaches you is an old house, a set of rusted armor and an ancestral warrant.

The sky above is the same either way. Drought, then flood, then locusts, heavy war taxes, growing crowds of refugees, enemies watching the borders. Seventeen years of it, and the question the game keeps asking is a simple one: living in that era, what kind of person would you become?

The local line is a slow squeeze. Farming, trade, crafts, schools, city walls: all of them want money the treasury does not have, while grain levies must be collected and disaster victims fed. You patch one hole by opening another and keep the place barely moving.

The courtroom keeps you busy too. Tenants refuse rent, a poisoning wipes out a family, grain shipments get robbed on the canal. Rule by the book or take the bribe and look away? Once your verdict is written, it cannot be unwritten.

And the pressure comes from above as well: envoys demanding funds arrive one after another, and a single secret denunciation can bring the imperial guards to your door. Stay clean and survive the triennial evaluation, or funnel embezzled silver upward for a bigger hat. There is no good or evil meter here, only consequences you own.