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The game has 5 days (20-30min), if you don't have much time I recommend playing at least 3 days

On Day 0 the sky woke, and it has been eating ever since.

You are the outer-door guard of Post 4. Each time the sky closes, a queue forms at your hatch. The hatch is a machine with a fixed number of cycles per day. One cycle is one person let inside. When the last cycle is spent the post seals, and the sky takes everyone still outside.

There is no clock. Take as long as you want with each person. The countdown is paid in lives, not seconds.

— WHAT'S BEHIND THE HATCH —

• 5 hand-authored days. Every person in the run has a name, papers and things they say. Nothing is randomly generated.
• Testimony is evidence. Liars carry perfect documents and betray themselves only in what they tell you.
• Rules change between days. Mistakes have names, and the names come back.
• No score, no HUD. Feedback arrives as printer slips, a dialogue wall and the night report.
• A radio on the desk that clears a blocked door and saves its cycle. What that means, you learn by doing it.

— THE THEME: COUNTDOWN —

Here the countdown is not seconds on a clock, it is cycles in a machine. Reading, listening and rejecting are free. Only letting someone in spends a cycle, and there are always more people than cycles. Every decision you rush is paid by someone further back in the line.

— MADE BY NOEL —

This was my first game jam, my first published game, my first pixel art and, as you will hear, my first time voice acting. I'm a software engineer by profession with a lifelong love for games, and this is the first one that made it out the door.

If you'd like to see Lost Cycles grow into a full project, join my Discord or write me directly at noel@naumachy.com.

Thanks a lot for playing :)

— DISCLAIMERS —

Made with Godot Engine <3 — © 2014–present Godot Engine contributors, © 2007–2014 Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur. MIT License: godotengine.org/license

All game design, sound design, art assets, script and dialogue is done by Noel and was created during the GMTK 2026 jam, no previous code, script, dialogue or art was used.
AI was used for PR reviews and git automations.
No creative work was made by AI.
Some audio assets were not made by me and fall under CC0 1.0 Universal.