APHELION

APHELION is a text-forward space-horror choose-your-own-adventure with puzzles built into the story. You play Vale, a rescue medic sent to the survey ship Aphelion-7, which went dark past the heliopause ten weeks ago. The airlock opens before you knock. Something aboard has been keeping the crew alive. It has not been helping them.

The prose is first-person present tense -- problem, reasoning, payoff -- and roughly 90% of the game is reading and choosing. The other 10% is about 21 pen-and-paper puzzles, each with one provable solution: AND/OR/NOT/XOR logic-gate circuits, Caesar ciphers broken by known-plaintext attack, zebra-style logic grids, and numeric constraint locks. Hints are available, but each costs sanity -- and as sanity drops, the game starts to lie: the prose shifts, and a late control panel swaps its own labels. Choices persist, two of them irrevocably (the save commits the moment you reach them). There are six tonally distinct endings, none clean, with a tracker that follows you across runs. Scene art on every beat, visual-novel dialogue, and a fully procedural Web Audio soundtrack in which each named crewmate carries a musical motif that stops mid-phrase when they die. Playable in any browser, desktop or phone; autosaves locally.

Transparency: APHELION was built with AI assistance (Claude). Code, art, and writing are AI-generated under human direction; the soundtrack is procedural WebAudio with no audio files. The first three acts are free in the browser; a one-time $1.99 key unlocks Act 4 and all six endings mid-run without losing the save.