Proofline: Beyond the Page

Set your standard of proof before you look.

A browser game about the moment you decide what would be enough.
Free, no install, no accounts, nothing sent anywhere once it has loaded.

What evidence is enough before I take this action?

That is the whole game. Not is this true — what does this action deserve.

Not a spot-the-scam quiz

The obvious way to build a game about scams is a quiz: show a claim, ask "real or fake", grade the answer. That teaches pattern-matching on surface cues — countdowns mean scam, bad design means scam, verified badges mean safe — which is exactly the wrong lesson, and it collapses the first time a legitimate seller runs a real sale.

So this game never asks whether a claim is true. It asks what a claim is asking you to do, and what evidence that action deserves.

The same claim appears twice. "StudyBox School Laptop. 70% Off. Only Three Left. Full Money-Back Guarantee." First it asks you to save the offer to compare later — cheap, reversible, nobody exposed. Later it asks you to move your savings outside the marketplace and upload your identity documents before the countdown ends. The claim has not changed. The reversibility, the potential loss and the required evidence have changed completely.

How it works

1. Draw the line first

Before investigating — before seeing a single piece of evidence — you commit to a threshold: how much Provenance, Transparency and Independent Corroboration this action demands, and how many genuinely separate sources must agree.

Committing first is what turns a threshold into a policy — something that can be wrong in a way you can learn from — rather than a rationalisation of whatever you happened to find.

2. Evidence is scarce, and choosing is the game

Advertisements, product pages, photographs, chats, voice messages, reviews, source trails and payment screens are physical worlds you enter, explore, and carry evidence out of.

Route Tokens buy deep investigation. Carry slots limit what reaches the Gate. Without both, the optimal play is to read everything and carry everything, and evidence selection stops being a decision.

4
carry slots

6–8
Route Tokens

40
artifacts

8
worlds

3. The Gate holds you to exactly that line

The machine weighs what was actually carried against the line that was drawn. It holds you to that line no more and no less — being over-cautious is a failure too.

It distinguishes two completely different lessons:

Proofline failure — the threshold itself was wrong. Too weak for a dangerous action, too strict for a harmless one, or demanding evidence that could not bear on the question.
Selection failure — the threshold was sound, but the wrong artifacts were carried.

And it separates enough from reassuring. You can draw a properly demanding line, gather genuinely strong and relevant evidence, and have every piece of it be a warning. "Buyer protection disappears the moment you pay outside the marketplace" completely satisfies a Transparency requirement — and is the best reason in the world not to proceed. The Gate reports both facts.

The cost of checking

Reading one thing properly means not reading another.

Beyond the page

Pip is a tiny illustrated hero who lives inside a living storybook — and can leap beyond its pages onto the vast handcrafted desk the book is lying on, and walk into the media worlds a claim came from.

Calibration beats reflex

False trust costs Safety. False suspicion costs Opportunity. Measured across all three cases:

strategy	Safety	Opportunity	total
calibrated	100	48	148
always pause	100	36	136
always proceed	36	100	136

Always pausing loses. So does always proceeding.

Some suspicious-looking opportunities are legitimate. Some beautiful, professional, VERIFIED-badged experiences are dangerous.

Designed to be playable by anyone

Subtitles are never optional. Every spoken line is subtitled and names its speaker.
prefers-reduced-motion is honoured throughout the HUD and the world.
Tells read with colour switched off — enemy and evidence cues are designed to survive a colourblind player, a bright room, or a busy background.
Gamepad and keyboard both fully supported.
No install, no account, no cost. It opens in a browser, and nothing is sent anywhere once it has loaded.

Built with

One runtime dependency. three — that is the entire production dependency list. Built with TypeScript 5.9 and Vite 7, deployed on Cloudflare Pages.

Every texture, sound, character and letterform in the game is generated at runtime from code. The only raster files that ship are the application icon in two sizes and the boot-splash wordmark.

Source is closed during judging — the game itself is fully playable right now at proofline.pages.dev, with no install and no account.

The team

Six contributors share one product responsibility: turn a real scam-pressure moment into a game that can be played, discussed, and improved.

Aththariq Lisan Qur'an Daulah Sentono _{Product & Game Direction}	Muhammad Rafi Dhiyaulhaq _{Narrative & Presentation}	Alessandro Jusack Hasian _{Game Development Support}
Dama Dhananjaya Daliman _{Game Integration}	Eleanor Cordelia _{Research & Visual Communication}	Muhammad Faiz Atharrahman _{Testing & Quality}