Trauma Response Simulator (SCI Edition)

You're having a bad day. Nothing dramatic: a typo in an email to your boss, a sigh from the next cubicle, your reflection in the CRT not looking quite like you for a second. You'll get ten of these before the shift ends. How you handle each one is the game.

Trauma Response Simulator started life as a browser game pretending to be an eighties computer terminal. It isn't pretending anymore: this is a genuine Sierra On-Line SCI0 game. The engine behind King's Quest IV and Space Quest III and compiles to run in real 16-bit MS-DOS.

No web frameworks. No modern look-alike. Just 320x200 16-color EGA, drop-shadowed dialog windows, a typed text parser, and the Sierra status bar across the top of the screen, quietly tracking your breakdown:

T.R.S. REP: 40 % | MASK: 60 % | CHILD: 60 %

The Setup

Every turn, a small, absurdly specific bad moment fires from your day, and you get three to five ways to handle it. Every one of them is secretly tagged as one of five trauma responses: fawn, flight, fight, freeze, or secure.

You never see the tag. You see the button text, your own portrait in the corner of the dialog watching you decide, and three numbers in the status bar moving in response.

Lean on the same response three times in one shift and it locks in as a Coping Mechanism: a passive modifier stacked onto every later choice of that type for the rest of the run. Four of the five are trades. The Approval Loop pads your Social Mask and quietly costs your Inner Child. The Void lets Repression climb while you're somewhere else. The fifth, Earned Security, is the only one that heals instead of trading.

Figuring out which is which, and whether you can bring yourself to pick the healthy option when your nervous system is on fire, is the whole game.

The Office

Between shifts, there's your office. The game starts there, every shift ends there, and nothing in it is on a timer.

Type to look around the way you would in any Sierra game of the era: LOOK AT THE CLOCK, OPEN THE DRAWER, SIT, BREATHE. The filing cabinet holds your Case Files. The mirror is where you decide who you look like today. And when you're ready  (only when you're ready) the computer on the desk will start another shift. If you change your mind, it'll wait.

What's in the Box

• 196 hand-written scenarios across six zones: Work, Home, Social, Self, Body, and Public. Selection isn't uniformly random: the engine steers toward the zones that press on your worst stat. If Repression is spiking, Work and Body show up more. It knows what you're worried about.
• Three to five choices per scenario, paged Sierra-style with More options... and Back.
• The Glitch: on about 15% of turns, an extra choice appears, written for that specific scenario. Normal choices have hidden effects; the glitch's effects are hidden from the game itself, rolled on the spot. Sometimes you really aren't in control.
• 102 endings: nine survival outcomes and three breakdowns, each written in eight to ten variations. Hold it together to the end of the shift and the engine reads your final posture. Let Repression hit 100%, your Social Mask hit zero, or your Inner Child bottom out, and meet one of thirty different breakdowns.
• Case Files (TRSCASE.DAT): a real save file in your game directory. Every ending variant and coping mechanism you've seen flips from sealed to readable, permanently: 107 entries to collect, browsed in a Sierra scrolling list from the filing cabinet or Ctrl+F.
• Four appearances, four moods each: your portrait shifts from neutral into one of three distressed states as your stats crack. Chosen once, remembered, and changed only at the office mirror.
• Extended Therapy (New Game+): survive a standard 10-turn shift once and it unlocks for good: 20 turns, every stat swing scaled 1.25x. Your nervous system has been here before. It doesn't get an easier shift.
• Your name, if you want: tell the game what to call you and it signs your endings. Leave it blank and they stay anonymous.
• General MIDI soundtrack through Sierra's own gm.drv.
• Reset Data (Ctrl+R) wipes your Case Files, the Extended Therapy unlock, your appearance, and your name, for a truly fresh start.

Running the Game

This is a real SCI0 game run by Sierra's own SCIV.EXE interpreter, so it needs a real DOS environment.

Windows / macOS / Linux

Use DOSBox-X, DOSBox Staging, or DOSBox:

mount c /path/to/TRS_SCI c: sciv 

Two things that won't work:

• ScummVM. Its SCI engine can't read this game's resources. Use DOSBox.
• Windows' built-in DOS prompt (Windows XP and friends). Its DOS layer can't draw EGA graphics, so you'll hear the music over a black screen. On a vintage Windows machine, run DOSBox there too.

Real DOS Hardware

Built for the same machines Sierra's 1988-90 SCI0 games targeted: an EGA or VGA card, 640KB of conventional memory, and MS-DOS 3.3 or later (FreeDOS works too). The whole game is about 1MB, so it fits on a single 1.44MB floppy. Reports from real iron are very welcome.

Controls

• Mouse: click choices, menu items, and the office's filing cabinet and computer.
• Keyboard: Tab or the arrow keys move between buttons, and Enter chooses. Esc closes the Case Files menu. In the office, just start typing to use the parser; F3 retypes your last command.
• Hotkeys: Ctrl+F Case Files · F9 Restart · Ctrl+R Reset Data · Ctrl+P Pause · Ctrl+Q Quit.

Content Note

This is dark comedy about coping mechanisms and modern anxiety, not a clinical instrument. It references panic, dissociation, corporate alienation, and substance use in passing, all played for the specific-not-generic kind of laugh.

If you are experiencing real distress or a crisis in your real life, please contact a local crisis hotline or a licensed professional instead of an MS-DOS prompt.

mount c /path/to/TRS_SCI c: sciv.exe