50 crew members. 5 transmissions. Something else on the planet.
Play It First
Try to get all 50 home. Then come back and read this.
What Is LAST CALL?
LAST CALL is a text-based survival game set in 1974. You play as Lieutenant Kira Malone — acting commander of the ARES-7, stranded on a classified planet called Tartarus somewhere between Saturn and Uranus. Your communications array has power for exactly 5 transmissions before it goes dark permanently.
Earth is 1.4 billion kilometres away. No one knows you're there.
Every word you type determines who lives.
The Story
In the summer of 1974, NASA launched its most secret mission.
The world was told ARES-7 was an unmanned atmospheric probe. The truth was carried by one man — Mission Commander Harold Voss — in a sealed envelope. The real destination was Tartarus, an undocumented rocky body hidden from all public star charts. The reason it was classified: Tartarus was broadcasting a signal. Repeating. Structured. Deliberate.
50 crew members were told it was a geological survey. None of them knew the truth.
They landed on Day 61. The signal stopped on Day 63.
By Day 66, Commander Voss was unconscious. His sealed orders — missing.
Today is Day 67. You are all that is left.
How It Works
The game runs across five screens:
Setup — Your ship name is randomly generated every run. No two games start the same.
The Story — A classified NASA dossier establishes who you are, why ARES-7 is on Tartarus, and why no one on Earth is coming unless you reach them first.
Mission Protocol — Five rules before you begin. The most important one:
Signal must reach 75% by your final transmission or rescue never locks your position.
Signal below 30% — Tartarus keeps you.
Ship Dossier — Your crew manifest, ship systems reference, last known position. Study it. The AI reads your vocabulary.
5 Transmissions — The entire game. Everything you built toward comes down to what you type here.
What the AI Actually Does
This is the part I am most proud of.
Most AI games use the model to generate story. LAST CALL uses it to read you. Every transmission you send is evaluated across four dimensions simultaneously:
| Dimension | What It Detects |
|---|---|
| Priority | Did you focus on the ship, the crew, or the signal? |
| Method | Rescue action, defensive move, or sacrifice? |
| Tone | Calm and decisive, or panicked and uncertain? |
| Consistency | Does this match what you said in previous transmissions? |
Calm, consistent, signal-focused commands compound across all five rounds. One panicked message in round 3 can undo two good rounds before it. Players feel genuinely sharper after a few runs — not because they learned a system, but because they learned to stay composed under pressure.
That is not a game mechanic. That is a real skill.
The Ship Systems Reference
Not everyone knows 1970s NASA ship terminology. So I built a collapsible Ship Systems Reference panel directly into the transmission screen — always one click away, never in the way.
It tells you what exists on the ship. The reactor core, the signal amplifier, the atmospheric scrubbers, the emergency pods. It gives you the vocabulary to write precise, decisive commands.
It does not tell you what to do. That part is still on you.
The Voyage Report
Every run ends with a full mission debrief — every decision replayed, every consequence revealed, and a Survival Archetype assigned based on your behaviour pattern across all five transmissions.
- Heroic Captain — calm tone maintained throughout
- Cold Rationalist — ship preservation over crew
- Martyr Commander — consistent sacrifice choices
- Humanitarian Leader — crew safety above all
- Strategic Survivor — signal-focused from start to finish
- Adaptive Navigator — inconsistent but resourceful
The report is designed to be screenshotted. What archetype did you get?
The Detail I Am Most Proud Of
On transmission 3, if the crisis takes you to the Tartarus surface — look at the far right of the darkness.
That is all I will say.
What I Learned Building This
MeDo handled this kind of project remarkably well. The multi-turn conversation system carries full context across every transmission — so the AI can reference a choice you made in round 2 when generating round 4's crisis, without any extra engineering from my side. The game feels alive because the AI genuinely remembers what you did.
The hardest part was not the logic. It was the tone.
Getting the CRT terminal aesthetic right. Making the story feel like a real 1974 NASA document. Writing crisis transmissions that feel urgent without feeling cheap. The game needed to earn its tension, not manufacture it.
I think it does.
Play LAST CALL
Try to survive. Try to get all 50 home.
And whatever you do — do not let the signal drop below 30%.
Built for the Build with MeDo Hackathon 2026
#BuiltWithMeDo
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