Two expansions gave Terminal.exe depth. The third gives it a voice, an ending, and a front-end that finally matches both. Expansion III is done - twelve phases, each spec'd, pinned to code, and verified before the next.
The run can end now. We added story choices that attach to the targets you complete, an escalating notoriety track, and real endings - so a run is a story that concludes instead of a counter that just keeps climbing. And past the last milestone sits true endless mode: what used to be a dead-end "ENDLESS MODE" label is now an actual system you graduate into.
Meet VESPER. The old tutorial was mechanical - it told you which button to press. Players asked for something that made them understand the depth. So we wrote VESPER, the dark-net handler who set you up with the rig in the first place. VESPER teaches every system at its first real encounter, in-fiction, through the existing narrative log rail - no new panels, no wall of tooltips. The mechanical tutorial gates still hold your hand; VESPER just gives the hand a personality and a grudge.
And the terminal got legible. The back half of Expansion III was a comprehension pass:
- Mobile design pass - a deliberate phone layout audited against live screenshots, killing a swipe-nav scroll hijack and fixing header tap targets, so drags inside a modal stop hijacking the page.
- Navigation & IA coherence - the nav actually tells you where things live and where new things appeared.
- Economy legibility - the numbers explain themselves, so upgrades read as decisions instead of guesses.
- Notifications v2 - a unified attention system with "affordable now" and "newly possible" cues that announce an unlock exactly once and then go quiet. Veteran saves get pre-seeded on upgrade, so returning players don't get buried in retroactive badges.
That last detail is the whole ethos of this expansion in miniature: respect the player's time, respect their save, and never make the interface shout. Every phase shipped on three green checks - strict types, lint, production build.
Terminal.exe is deeper, louder in the right places, quieter in the rest, and for the first time it has a last page. Go find your ending at terminal.cathoderaygames.com. VESPER's been expecting you.