Extraction games live or die on one feeling: the sense that doing anything at all gives something away. Move fast, you make noise. Take the good angle, you expose your back. We built two systems this build to push that feeling into the parts of the raid that were too quiet: getting around, and seeing in the dark.
01Riot Doors, and the loud shortcut
The Citadel was never meant to be a set of open floors you jog across. GRIM quarters every floor with Riot Doors: heavy blast bulkheads that seal corridors, wall off whole wings, and cut the direct line between where you are and where you want to be.
Some are on GRIM's leash: the warden drops and lifts them mid-raid to reroute the building around you. Others you can force yourself: a breach charge, a panel hack, a pried control box. And forcing one is one of the most tempting, most expensive things you can do in a run.
Force that Riot Door and you buy a shortcut: a flank onto a squad holding the long way, a fast line to an extraction that's about to close, an exit from a fight you're losing. But the breach is loud and it's public. The door's state flips on every operator's floor map the instant it goes. Everyone now knows a door just opened, and roughly where. Worse, GRIM logs the breach and takes an interest: force its architecture and the building starts answering.
A forced Riot Door raises your heat with the warden. Sustained tampering on a floor is the fastest way to pull a GRIM-L1n response down on your position; see the next log.
So the door is a question you ask yourself in the worst possible moment: it's the last ninety seconds, extraction is across the floor, and there's a sealed shortcut right there. Take the fast, loud line and race whoever heard it, or take the long way, quiet, and hope the clock holds. That decision didn't exist in the build before this one. Now it's everywhere.
02Seeing in the dark is a tell
The Citadel has real darkness: blackout floors, sealed interiors, the cellars, whole wings where GRIM has cut the power. You cannot fight what you cannot see. But in an extraction game, every way of seeing is also a way of being seen. So we don't hand you night vision and call it solved. We give you a choice, and we make you pay for it. Three tools. Pick one per raid.
The glowstick is the new one, and it's my favourite thing in the build. It's the only light you can separate from your body. Snap one and throw it, and you get a pool of light where you aren't standing: down a corridor you're about to cross, into a room you want a squadmate to clear, onto a corner you want someone to watch while you flank the other side.
But glowsticks don't move and they don't die quietly. They burn for minutes, exactly where they landed. Which means anyone who comes through behind you can read them like tracks in snow: a live stick says someone was here, recently, and went that way. The best players I've watched in playtests already weaponise this, throwing a couple of sticks down a hallway they never intend to walk just to sell a direction they aren't going.
The only question that ever really matters in the Citadel: who else knows I'm here?
That's the thread tying these two systems together. A Riot Door and a glowstick have nothing mechanically in common, but they ask you the same thing. The shortcut is faster and louder. The light lets you see and lets you be seen. We never want you to get something for free. We want you to look at the advantage, look at the price tag stapled to it, and decide.
Next log is about the thing on the other end of all this noise: the GRIM-L1ns, and the pass we did to make them react to you and, finally, look like something you can tell apart from a real player. Florent
