SYSADMIN Hell

Welcome to your new job. You're already behind.

You are the only IT person at Pinnacle Synergy Group. There's a queue. It's already full. Users are panicking, Management is angry, and the printer is hostile. Then the company starts to grow.

Grow it. Buy a company. Regret it.

At 12,000 employees, Management buys Halcyon Data Solutions, and their IT becomes yours: a fax machine that is also the email server, forty shared drives called NEW, and a sysadmin who never left. Integrate them in three days, or the board brings in consultants and sends you the bill.

Mine HellCoin on the company servers

The last sysadmin left a crypto miner running in a cupboard in the server room. From your first morning it's yours:

Buy rigs, faster GPUs and liquid cooling, and watch the coins pile up

The price wanders, and jumps or crashes on the headlines

Sell into the IT budget (Finance calls it "cost savings")

The rigs cook the servers and make Compliance curious. Take Compliance to lunch. Switch off before Audit Day. Keep a cold wallet

The Board has three slides

Every few days the Board makes you pick a policy that lasts the rest of your career: Hustle culture, Cloud first, AI-first strategy, Run IT as a profit centre... Every one is a trade, and no two careers end up the same.

Get up from your desk

Some problems can't be fixed from a chair. Walk the office: open-plan floors, a server room that hums, a supply cupboard, and a lift that doesn't stop at 4.

Fix it in person: trace the right cable, pull a paper jam out the way it went in, find the empty toner, change a light tube without losing your eyebrows

Build PCs at the workbench for new starters, to their spec and Finance's budget

Run the server room: amber drive lights, loose cables, fans full of dust

Read the ticket. Fix the problem. Don't make it worse.

Every ticket is a small puzzle, and the answer is usually in the text if you read it properly. Pick the right quick fix and it's gone. Pick the wrong one and it grows.

170+ hand-written tickets that get stranger as the company grows, plus your own: write tickets for your office, or subscribe to packs on the Steam Workshop

Rush hours, SLAs, escalations from executives, and a Chaos meter that sets off incidents when the backlog gets away from you

Hit rock bottom and HR puts you on a Performance Improvement Plan. Meet it, or clear your desk

A whole desktop from 1998

The game is a working late-90s desktop: drag windows, minimise them to the taskbar, live inside HellDesk, HellMail Express, Server Manager and Add/Remove Automation. Automate everything (13 automations, every one fails in its own way), keep it serviced, hire junior admins with real quirks, and watch them burn out.

Or do it all from the command line

The HellDOS Prompt runs the whole job by typing: QUEUE, FIX 12 2, REBOOT MAIL-01, HLC SELL. It also knows a few things it shouldn't. Try PING FLOOR4.

Every day is different

Patch Tuesday, Audit Day, Board Visit, Heatwave, Full Moon, and seasonal days on their real dates

Branching major incidents: ransomware, a reply-all storm that becomes self-aware, a printer hostage situation

A company of the week, the same twist for everyone: a hospital, a law firm, a crypto startup...

Something is wrong with this company

Tickets arrive from nobody. The printer has started writing letters. There's a server nobody installed, warm to the touch. The lift has a button for 4. It has never stopped there. Halcyon's building has a floor 4 too, and their sysadmin knows where the keys are.

Lots to come back for

Multiple endings, and one that's well hidden; an endless mode with milestones and a leaderboard

Three difficulties, contract clauses, and backgrounds that change how a career starts

HellDesk University: permanent perks that carry from career to career

The Daily Shift: the same day for everyone, on a leaderboard, with streaks and office leagues

Your Company: put your own workplace, boss and coworkers into the tickets

61 achievements, a sarcastic office assistant, procedural hold music, a boss key, and Bugsweeper (on company time)

Play with mouse and keyboard, or a controller (Steam Deck friendly)

English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian

Clock in. You're already behind.