The handwritten sticker on the hard drive said KEEP.

The drive's been in the garage a long time and it's failing while you read it. Every bit on that platter is on its way out, and once a sector goes dark you don't get it back. So you're down in the BitRot Defender writing salvage routines against the clock, except your code rots as it runs—every eighth instruction executes and then deletes itself.

You won't outrun the rot, so you'll have to learn to aim it.

Pull what you can before the whole thing goes.

What did he think was worth keeping?

This game is like TIS-100, if the code had a half-life.

Developer Note: I've always wanted to make a zach-like game, and the GMTK Countdown theme gave me an idea I wanted to explore to see if it had legs where, you're writing programs but they're corrupting as you write them and you have to use that to solve puzzles. I also had this ANSI rendering engine I'd been puttering away on that seemed like a great fit. Hope you enjoy! If people like it, maybe there's more to the story.

Installation: Recommended using the itch.io app: https://itch.io/app to avoid the annoying signing warnings.