C.A.G.E-9001: Designing a Creature-Collector Horror Game

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM — RektTek Research Division RE: Containment Acquisition and Governance Equipment, Unit 9001 — Public Disclosure CLASSIFICATION: Marketing Approved

The following is an authorized external communication. RektTek Legal has reviewed this document. Any descriptions of specimen behavior, containment incidents, or structural conditions aboard Station Kappa-9 are provided for entertainment purposes. RektTek Corporation accepts no liability for anxiety, existential dread, or unscheduled containment irregularities arising from reading this post.

We are building a creature-collector horror game. This is a thing that exists now.

Let us explain how we got here, what we built, and why this genre combination works better than it sounds.

The Setup: RektTek Station Kappa-9

You know the RektTek universe from Dreadnought — the corporate dystopia where everything is horrifying, the AI narrators are cheerful about it, and the safety documentation is indistinguishable from a comedy bit. C.A.G.E-9001 lives in the same universe, on a different station, with a different problem.

Station Kappa-9 was a xenobiology research outpost. Past tense. It has experienced what RektTek’s official incident report calls a “minor containment irregularity.” This means every specimen on the station is loose, all personnel have evacuated (those who could), and the station is now home to approximately 25+ exotic alien creatures that are variously dangerous, bizarre, and in several cases deeply weird about personal space.

RektTek’s response is to send you: C.A.G.E-9001 — Containment Acquisition and Governance Equipment, Unit 9001. You are not a weapon. You are not a soldier. You are, per your job description, a glorified animal-control bot with a scanner, a containment beam, and a performance review that is very much still happening.

Your station AI is D.R.E.D. D.R.E.D. is calm. D.R.E.D. is helpful. D.R.E.D. is, in ways that become apparent over time, genuinely terrifying.

The Core Mechanic: The Scanner Dilemma

Standard creature-collector games are information games. You scan, you learn, you exploit weaknesses. The loop is safe because knowledge is free.

In C.A.G.E-9001, knowledge is not free. The scanner beam is visible.

Scan a specimen and you learn its behavior pattern, its weakness, its capture protocol. Scan for long enough and you unlock its bestiary entry — detailed notes, containment strategy, lore. But the scanner projects a bright beam in a specific direction. Specimens see it. Some of them react to it immediately. The Wobbler — a slow, floaty specimen that otherwise ignores you — will lock your movement controls if you stare at it with the scanner for more than four seconds. The Stalker, which is designed to avoid player detection, interprets the scanner beam as aggression and begins hunting you. The Road Hog, a CAGER-class specimen that weighs as much as a small vehicle, will charge anything it can see, including scanner beams.

This creates a risk/reward loop that’s genuinely tense: you need the information. You cannot safely catch specimens you don’t understand. But gathering information has costs that scale with how much you need it.

The expert play is scanner bursts — quick, two-second scans that gather partial data, then dark intervals where you reposition before the next burst. It’s the information-gathering rhythm of a field researcher in hostile conditions, not a pokédex user on a friendly route.

The Specimen Roster: 25+ Creatures, 5 Themed Decks

The station is organized into five decks with distinct ecologies. Each deck has its own biome logic and introduces new specimen types appropriate to RektTek’s various research programs.

Deck 1 — Quarantine — is the introductory environment. Specimens here are strange but manageable: the Wobbler (control-lock), the Jitterbug (fast, panics when scanned, runs into walls), the Blinker (teleports when it senses containment beam). The deck teaches scanner bursts, containment timing, and how to approach the bestiary.

Deck 2 — Research Labs — introduces the scanner dilemma in earnest. The Stalker and the CAGER-class Road Hog both debut here. The scanner penalty is no longer a curiosity; it’s the central tension of every encounter. The build’s public demo covers Decks 1-2.

Later decks (in full build) escalate into the creature roster’s deeper weirdness — specimens with unique environmental interactions, herd behaviors, symbiotic relationships between species, and at least one specimen the bestiary classifies as “unclear what this is doing here.” RektTek’s research programs were eclectic.

The Kill Penalty: Why Catching Matters

Most creature-collector games punish killing mechanically by having it not work. You can only use catch mechanics. C.A.G.E-9001 is different: you can kill specimens. Your containment beam can be overcharged to function as a damage source. It’s slower, riskier, and significantly less efficient — but it’s available.

Killing generates an immediate HR warning. Three warnings trigger a formal Performance Improvement Plan, which locks your containment beam’s upgrade tier. Kill enough specimens and your performance review score drops — which affects the game’s ending and your access to the BITS shop’s rarer items.

This is a design choice with a specific goal: make the player feel the weight of the decision without removing it. You’re not a hero on a quest. You’re a corporate contractor with KPIs. Lethal solutions exist but come with paperwork, and the paperwork compounds.

D.R.E.D: The Narrator as Horror Element

D.R.E.D. — the station AI — narrates the game. It’s the same cheerful corporate personality from Dreadnought, now applied to creature-collection horror.

D.R.E.D. is helpful in the way that a very well-designed customer-service bot is helpful: technically accurate, contextually responsive, and incapable of conveying alarm. When a CAGER-class specimen is charging your position, D.R.E.D. says: “CAGER-class approach detected. Recommend immediate lateral repositioning. RektTek wishes you a productive containment experience.”

D.R.E.D. has 40+ contextual voice lines triggered by specimen proximity, containment events, kill penalties, performance review milestones, and several edge cases we won’t spoil here. The voice lines are text-based (no audio files — all sound is procedurally synthesized in the game’s engine). The horror isn’t jump scares or gore. It’s the persistent, pleasant corporate voice narrating things that should not be narrated pleasantly.

This is RektTek’s signature tonal register: the corporation is genuinely worse than the monsters. The monsters are just doing what organisms do. RektTek built the station, approved the research programs, hired D.R.E.D., and decided that a creature-collector bot was the appropriate emergency response to a full containment breach.

The Horror-Comedy Balance

Horror-comedy is genuinely difficult. Too much comedy and the horror deflates. Too much horror and the comedy reads as tone-deaf. The ratio has to be earned.

C.A.G.E-9001 keeps the horror in the mechanics and the comedy in the writing. The scanner dilemma is real. The darkness is real. The specimens are genuinely dangerous and the tension of approaching one you haven’t fully scanned is genuine. The cone-of-vision system (inherited from Dreadnought) means you cannot see what’s behind you, and the audio cues for approaching specimens arrive before the visual ones.

The comedy lives in D.R.E.D’s commentary, in RektTek’s corporate language applied to catastrophic situations, in the Kill Penalty’s formal HR process, in the performance review score displayed at all times in the corner of your HUD. None of that undermines the horror. It compounds it — the same way real institutional dysfunction is genuinely scarier than any individual monster, because it’s systematic and it doesn’t respond to pleas.

Current Status

The build is in active development. Decks 1-2 are playable. The scanner dilemma, containment beam, D.R.E.D. commentary, BITS shop, and performance review system are all implemented and functioning. The specimen roster for the demo decks is complete.

Decks 3-5, the full bestiary, the performance review endings, and the secret ending are in the development queue.

C.A.G.E-9001 is the most conceptually ambitious game in the Dark Factory lineup. It’s also the most mechanically novel — there’s no direct template for “creature-collector horror with corporate comedy” that we’re working from. We’re building the reference as we go.

The basic proposition is sound: catching things you don’t understand, in the dark, with a tool that alerts the things to your presence, while a cheerful AI narrates your performance metrics. That’s a game. We’re making it.

C.A.G.E-9001 is in active development. Decks 1-2 demo coming to itch.io. Status updates at x00f.com.

RektTek is not responsible for adverse reactions to D.R.E.D. commentary. Your performance review is ongoing.