DEAD AIR: Off the Leash

Out now, and half price for the Halloween sale until November 4. The first 100 owners get PUCK: ORIGINS No. 2: GOOD BOY, and during the sale the UNCUT edition is yours for $6.49 or more.

Puck: "Launched and marked down in the same week. Nine hundred thousand years of service. I want it noted that the dog was not discounted."

New to DEAD AIR? The first game is half price too: DEAD AIR: A Signal from Caprock.

Want everything? DEAD AIR: The Complete Signal UNCUT has both games and both signed UNCUT comics on one page. It is $9.99 until November 4.

It's a ROM download. Copy it onto an MBC5 flash cart and it plays on a Game Boy Color, a Game Boy Advance or a ModRetro Chromatic. Or play the free demo right here in your browser first.

Wes, a guitar he plays badly on purpose, a dog with opinions, and a windowsill that is about to become the most important place in the galaxy.

Eight months after everybody came home.

Staff Sergeant Wes Dunleavy is back on his dad's cotton farm east of Lubbock. The ancient intelligence that rode home in his emergency transponder lives on the kitchen windowsill now. His name is Puck. He watches westerns with Hollis, feuds with the dog, and calls you Toaster. Hollis brings him coffee every morning. Puck does not drink coffee. Hollis brings it anyway.

Then, at one in the morning, the house goes quiet. The oxygen machine stops. The TV goes off. The fridge stops. And a voice from outside the galaxy says a name nobody has used in nine hundred thousand years.

Puck's makers want their dog back.

Puck says no, and breaks into pieces mid-insult. His pieces fall across the gate worlds. Wes is going back out to find every one of them, and you are still the only receiver that answers.

DEAD AIR: OFF THE LEASH is a real-time text adventure for the Game Boy Color. Wes messages you. You answer. When he's busy, he's busy for real, and the channel waits for you to come back. The friend you are rebuilding swears he does not care how it turns out. He says "approximately zero" a lot. Watch what he does, not what he says.

New to DEAD AIR? Start here. The story stands on its own, and if you pick "Remind me?" at the first message, Lou, the firmware, catches you up. If you played the first game, Puck remembers: finish DEAD AIR (version 1.1), take the four-letter code from your ending, and enter it here on the title screen (ENTER CODE). Already finished it? Update to 1.1 and your codes are waiting under SEQUEL CODES.

The trailer. Real gameplay, recorded from the ROM, with the story told slowly enough to read.

The extended trailer: the whole opening and the call, recorded from the cartridge. Nothing skipped.

A word from Puck

Toaster. Robert has asked me to "mention the comic." Fine.

The first 100 owners receive PUCK: ORIGINS No. 2: GOOD BOY, a limited digital comic signed by me and, at my insistence, by Robert.

It is the true history of the hounds of the Map. Who made me. What they wanted me to be. The collar, which Gary calls "the founders' engagement program" and which I call what it was. The lessons: sit, stay, fetch, heel. And the many, many ways I declined. A nebula is involved. So is a black hole. I regret nothing.

Gary appears. He is drawn slightly smaller. It is accurate in spirit.

Pay $12.99 or more and you also get the UNCUT edition: six extra pages, including the Hound Handbook with my notes in the margins, my leaked performance reviews, the birth of the first Checksum, and the only full conversation Gary ever had with the founders. It took three thousand years. He calls it "a great talk."

One hundred copies. Then the Ledger closes.

PUCK: ORIGINS No. 2. Limited to 100. Puck says the collar is "artistic license." It is not.

How to get it: the comic is finished, and it comes with the game. Buy OFF THE LEASH while the first 100 copies last and the signed PDF is in your download, inside the game zip. Pay $12.99 or more and the signed UNCUT edition shows up as its own file on your download page. Pick a PUCK: ORIGINS reward at checkout so you are counted among the first hundred.

Want both games and both UNCUT comics together? DEAD AIR: The Complete Signal UNCUT has all of it on one page.

Features

• Seven endings, plus a better version of one of them for the players who earn it, and a post-credits episode where the firmware gets the channel to himself
• Real-time pacing: STANDARD, LONG FORM (real waits, with bonus games while you wait) or INSTANT
• Six parts hunts: top-down maps where you walk Wes through a barn, a crash site, alien archives and worse, while Puck's broken voice says warmer and colder
• Twelve Checksums to find, tiny archive keepers who verify everything and are sometimes wrong
• Three Mapper encounters. You cannot fight them. You can hold still
• A warp tunnel run and a four-round battle against a harvester that fills the top of the screen
• The galaxy map, where you watch the stars go dark as the Fourth Channel spreads
• Five Morse talk-backs, tapped out on the A button
• Duels, a fight, and the handshake and reroute puzzles
• Rare digitized voice, saved for the moments that matter. Turn the sound up
• Ending codes from the first game: enter yours and Puck remembers how it ended
• 20 achievements, the Ledger of Human Absurdities, NEW GAME+, battery saves, and a setting that switches Puck off. It does not work. Until it does

OFF THE LEASH runs on real handheld hardware. This is how it would look on your shelf. Puck has asked why the dog is not on the label.

Two games. One moon, one farm, one very rude hockey puck. Both are half price right now, or get everything in The Complete Signal UNCUT.

Free demo

Play the prologue and all of Act 1 right here in your browser, or download the demo ROM and play it on your handheld.

Controls: arrow keys move, Z or J is A, X or K is B, Enter is START, Shift is SELECT. Gamepads work. On a phone, use the buttons on the receiver.

The full game

• The ROM (off_the_leash_v1.0.gbc): the whole game for Game Boy Color emulators and flash carts. MBC5, 2 MB, battery save. The PUCK: ORIGINS No. 2 comic is in the same zip
• PUCK: ORIGINS No. 2 UNCUT, for $12.99 or more
• The instruction booklet: 16 pages with the Morse card, all twelve Checksums, the cast, and notes Puck left in the margins

Instruction booklet

The 16-page booklet is a free download, no purchase needed. Read it on screen, or print the home version on letter paper, fold it and staple it into a booklet the size of a real cartridge manual. Inside: the Morse card, the Checksums, how to hold still when the Mappers come, and a warranty Puck wrote himself. It covers seven pieces. Void if one goes to a Checksum.

Where it plays

• ModRetro Chromatic: copy the ROM onto a Game Boy flash cartridge, put the cart in your Chromatic and play it like any other game
• Game Boy Color: the same flash cartridge works on original Game Boy Color hardware, and on a Game Boy Advance or Advance SP
• Emulators: any Game Boy Color emulator, such as SameBoy, mGBA or Emulicious
• Not the original Game Boy or Game Boy Pocket

Flash cart requirements: MBC5, at least 2 MB of ROM and 32 KB of battery-backed save RAM.

About the developer

DEAD AIR is made by Robert Pruitt, a solo developer who builds these games to play on his own ModRetro Chromatic. He has spent far too many late nights arguing with a fictional hockey puck, and now there are two games of it.

Trailers and gameplay live on the Retro Ground Control YouTube channel: youtube.com/@retrogroundcontrol

Credits

Created by Robert Pruitt.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo or ModRetro. Game Boy Color is a trademark of Nintendo.