Terms of Service

The Sunken City (https://sunken-city.gamestrategists.com)

What these terms actually cover

This subdomain is one thing: the browser build of The Sunken City. Eight acts, fifteen puzzles, twenty simulated websites (forty-five pages between them), thirty-six collectible clues, twenty-two emails, four endings plus an epilogue — The Eternal Seal, the hidden Voice of the Abyss, the secret Child of the Tide, the true ending The Sunken City, and The Return, which only appears if you go back to the guesthouse after the true ending. There is also an eight-page lighthouse log, one page per act. Those numbers live in the game’s own data files (acts, clues, emails, puzzles, endings, locations and the per-site pages, each its own file); you can count the same set under src/data/: eight acts, thirty-six clues, twenty-two emails, fifteen puzzles, forty-five pages, eight lighthouse pages — no fewer, and nothing extra.

The publisher is alphaBETA DEV (GameStrategists): one person, not a company.

Two things sit outside these terms. First, the pages on the main site gamestrategists.com — this game’s long page, its guides, the changelog — which have their own terms; where the two disagree, the subdomain you are actually playing wins. Second, this game has exactly one distribution channel: the browser. Counting the main site’s registry for all nineteen games on 2026-11-03, only three carry a Microsoft Store link (Dajin, Room 404, Xiaoqi) and The Sunken City is not one of them. So there is no store-side install, refund or content-rating question for this page to answer.

Free, ad-funded, and how that balances

Nothing here costs money: no registration, no in-app purchases, no paid chapters, no payment method to connect. With no money coming in there is nothing to refund — arguments like “was replaying for that hidden ending worth it” have no object to settle here; nobody can hand you money back, and nobody can undo a choice for you.

Domain and hosting do cost something, and the plan is to cover that with revenue from the Google AdSense script the pages load. The game’s home page really does load one Google ad script (sampled across twenty-one live domains on 2026-11-03: exactly one each). The hand-built slot, however, is switched off in this repository (src/components/AdBanner.vue holds const ADS_ENABLED = false): over three real-browser rounds the same day, the home page showed zero visible boxes labelled “ad” and zero non-0×0 ad elements; the DOM contained one hidden 0×0 ad container, which is a placeholder the loader inserts itself, not a slot we placed. If the account starts serving and the slot is really opened, the two sentences above get updated. Which ad runs is the ad network’s call — we neither see it nor choose it. How ads pick you, and how to turn personalisation off, is in the privacy policy; that document is the one that governs it.

One more layer deserves separating: the ad script is only in the game’s own HTML. On 2026-11-03 six pages were each opened three times, one fresh session per page, and every outbound request was written down. The two kinds of page are not one table:

• The game page /: seven hosts in each of the three rounds — this site, plus pagead2.googlesyndication.com, googleads.g.doubleclick.net, ep1.adtrafficquality.google, ep2.adtrafficquality.google, www.google.com and static.cloudflareinsights.com. The only cookie the browser showed was test_cookie@.doubleclick.net, present in all three rounds.
• The explainer pages /terms (this page), /privacy, /about, /contact, /disclaimer: two hosts per round — this site and static.cloudflareinsights.com. The ad endpoints above appeared 0 times across 15 readings, no cookie at all, and localStorage was empty.

That Cloudflare beacon is injected by the hosting platform into every HTML document; it reports aggregate traffic and performance, and in the measurements it sent one POST /cdn-cgi/rum per round. Every number quoted on this page comes from a real round of readings like these, or from the game’s own data files — not from copying another page.

What is on the screen before you begin

This game has no tick-box gate at the door. Two measured rounds on 2026-11-03: zero visible checkboxes on the title screen, and pressing “Start Investigation” goes straight in with nothing in between (0 dialogs). Before the 2026-10-18 revision this really was a full-screen wall you had to acknowledge before the game would let you through; it is now a collapsed panel behind a toggle on the title screen labelled “Before you start · Disclaimer”, whose first line reads “This is a wholly fictional interactive story; nothing below affects how you enter.” The panel holds three parts: a fiction notice (people, places, institutions, events and dialogue are inventions — do not treat them as fact or imitate them), a content warning (horror, dread and psychological pressure; sudden sound effects, flicker and jump cuts may occur; not for people with photosensitive epilepsy or a low tolerance — close the page and rest if you feel unwell), and an immersion notice. A line of small text at the top-left of the title screen says “Scene illustration (AI-generated), not a photograph”.

With no save on the device, five things on the title screen are pressable: a sound toggle that carries only an accessibility label and no text (before the first press it reads “Mute ambience”, after it “Unmute ambience”), “Start Investigation”, the “Before you start · Disclaimer” toggle, the “EN” language switch, and “Related works”. Once a save exists the main button becomes “Continue Investigation” and a “Start over” appears next to it — six items on screen then (both states were actually clicked on 2026-11-03).

No audio file is downloaded for this game; every sound is synthesised in your browser with Web Audio: a three-second brown-noise loop through a 460 Hz low-pass filter as the sea-wall bed, three drones at 55 / 82.5 / 110 Hz, a 0.055 Hz oscillator that pushes the filter’s cutoff back and forth, and a wave, foghorn or gull every 13–27 seconds. The audio context is only created after you have made a real gesture; until then this site has no audio node at all and asks you for no device permission — the notification, geolocation and clipboard APIs are never called here.

This is a single-player work: no other players, no chat, no request for your identity. On the title screen there are 0 form elements, 0 input elements and 0 textarea elements (measured 2026-11-03). Once inside, the only places you can type are the in-game search box, your own notebook and the puzzle answer fields; all of them are read in the browser, and there is no form anywhere on the site that submits anything to a server. The subject matter is not aimed at children under thirteen.

What your machine stores, and what gets cleared

This site writes three keys to your device, each doing one job, all of them browser-only:

• sunken-city-save — how far this run has got. Ten fields are written (location, current page, emails read, clues held, puzzles solved, pages visited, act, ending, the text in your notebook, and the interface language). Nothing wraps it: this game computes no checksum over the save and encrypts nothing, so this page does not claim “we have validation protecting your data”.
• arg-audio-sunken-city — two values only, muted and on, recording your choice about ambience; with no such key on the device yet, sound is on.
• gs_achievements — the badge from the ending screen (work, ending name, date), stored one entry per game id so the next ending card can draw it. The date is the first ten characters of toISOString(), which is a UTC day, not your local one — finishing after midnight records the previous day.

Simply opening the site writes nothing: in three cold rounds on 2026-11-03 localStorage was empty after landing. The keys appear once you act — pressing “Start Investigation” writes sunken-city-save (both rounds: that one key, 207 characters); pressing the language switch on the title screen without ever entering the game writes that same key, because the interface language is one of its fields.

Three routes to clear things actually work today. The first is the “Start over” button on the title screen: it only appears on screen when a save already exists (differential test on the same save: seed a valid save and the screen shows “Continue Investigation” plus “Start over”; write nothing and there is only “Start Investigation”, no such button). Here it does ask first — “Are you sure? All progress will be lost.” — and confirming removes only sunken-city-save, deleting the key outright rather than replacing its contents with a fresh start; the other two keys, the ending badge and the sound choice, stay untouched, byte for byte, so someone chasing the other endings is not forced to replay from act one. Pressing “Cancel” on the same save leaves all three keys alone — that is a control round’s real reading, not an inference. Second, clearing site data for this site in your browser takes all three. Third, playing in a private window that does not persist local data ends with the tab.

What happens with a damaged save was also run two ways, twice each, with matching readings. If the string is not valid JSON at all, it is treated as no save: the screen offers only “Start Investigation”, the “Start over” button does not appear, and the broken value is left in the key untouched (this round it was not cleaned up for you) until the next real write overwrites it. If it parses but a field has the wrong type (this round act held a Chinese numeral instead of a number), it still counts as a save — both “Continue Investigation” and “Start over” appear and the title screen reports no error (0 pageerrors). With no checksum there is no finer repair: a damaged save is handled by starting over, not by sending what you had not finished somewhere else to be looked at again. The privacy policy has a longer version of this.

What you may do, and what needs asking first

The intellectual-property rule keeps the wording this site has always used — nothing added, nothing withdrawn: except where stated otherwise, the text, images, code, game design and story belong to alphaBETA DEV (GameStrategists) and may not be copied, modified or redistributed without written permission. Want to use it elsewhere? Write to contact@gamestrategists.com, say where you want to use it and how you intend to credit it.

Do not attack, disrupt or route around how this site is meant to be read. It serves static pages only: the server-side code in the deployment does one thing — hand the request to the static files (env.ASSETS.fetch(request) is the whole of src/worker.js). It reads no cookies, writes no access log, and there is no key-value store and no database. The build contains no service worker either (measured 2026-11-03: registration count 0, in all three rounds on all six pages), so no offline copy lingers on your machine. The rule still applies.

A handful of links on this site point at pages other people maintain: the Google ad-settings page, aboutads.info’s opt-out list and Cloudflare’s privacy policy, all of them inside the privacy policy. Those pages are theirs — this site is not responsible for their content or their privacy practices, and cannot answer for how they handle cookies there. Everything else you can click on this subdomain leads back to this site’s own pages.

Crawlers: this subdomain’s robots.txt allows User-agent: *, carries no Disallow line at all, additionally names nine AI and generative-retrieval crawlers as allowed (Google-Extended, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, CCBot, Omgilibot, PerplexityBot, Applebot-Extended), and declares this site’s own sitemap. Naming them is so people can find the game and summaries can cite it — it is not permission to drain the text and stand up an identical site elsewhere. That is still redistribution under the paragraph on intellectual property above, and needs asking first.

Offered “as is”

This is a personal project maintained in spare time: no service-level promise, no guarantee it is always reachable, and no guarantee that an answer key or the rule that advances an act will never change. Fourteen of the fifteen puzzles ship their own list of accepted spellings (46 entries in total); for text ones your input is normalised in exactly two ways — trimmed of surrounding whitespace, lower-cased — and compared line by line against that puzzle’s own list, then discarded. One puzzle is a four-way choice and compares no text. One (the dark-web puzzle) has an answer computed from how many clues you hold at that moment — that number to the fourth power — and that arithmetic runs on your side too; the two values sitting in its data file are never consulted on the validation path. Acts do not advance by pressing “next chapter”: they move from the clue count you have reached (thresholds 3, 5, 8, 11, 14, 18, 22). All thirty-six clues really are obtainable: the delivery table has 37 page entries pointing at those 36, one clue reachable from two pages.

If we ever tighten an accepted answer or re-order an act, guides already published will stop matching the game as it is then. When that happens the change leaves a record and mistakes get stated and corrected in the open — those two are the promises; do not expect a third by the standard of a commercial service. Everything about this game is logged in the main site’s changelog, each entry with its own date, newest first. This page deliberately does not copy its entry count: that figure changes the moment anything is logged, and writing “N entries in total” here would make it a lie the next day. Whenever the text of this page genuinely changes, the “Last updated” line above moves with it — taken from the date this page’s text was last changed in the version history, not written by hand from a calendar.

For any direct or indirect loss arising from use of this site, no liability is accepted; the content is for entertainment and reference and is not professional advice. Everything inside the game is fiction: Lan City and its fisherman’s guesthouse, the tide forum, the lan-city-evening paper, the institute of oceanography, the lighthouse, the folk museum, the ancient-texts library, the sea-view church, the submarine and the observatory, together with addresses such as lodge.lan-city.cn and bbs.lan-city.cn; the 1587 earliest record, the 1740 bell-tower foundation, the 1962 pressure chamber and the people inside it, a 222-year cycle and the fifteen-day window of 2026, the stone dated 4,200 years before present, the 52 Hz fundamental, the S.P.S. project number, and the names Shen Yu, Chen Yuanzhou, Chen Qinglian and Chen Shouyi. They imitate the layout of real institutions and real archives so that players make choices inside an interface that feels like one; they represent no real institution, person or event, and state no account of any real accident. The title-screen scene says “AI-generated, not a photograph” inside the game itself, and this page does not pretend to be a photograph either.

How this page changes, and where to find me

Terms change, and there is one way they change: this page is updated and the date above is replaced. There is no control here for you to press — the five explainer pages (this one, /privacy, /about, /contact, /disclaimer) contain not a single button element (measured one by one on 2026-11-03: 0 each), and the browser keeps no record of whether you have read them. So “continued use means you accept the updated terms” has to be read literally: keep using it and we take that as acceptance; if you do not accept, close the page — the game will not break, and it will not stop you playing because you never read this.

Questions about the terms themselves go to contact@gamestrategists.com; anything involving personal data goes to privacy@gamestrategists.com and is governed by the privacy policy. Replies are written by a person. How quickly, this site answers on the contact page; this page does not copy that figure again, so that two pages never hold two different promises about the same thing.