Terms of Service

Midnight Frequency: The Last Broadcast (https://midnight-frequency.gamestrategists.com)

What these terms actually cover

What lives on this subdomain is the browser build of Midnight Frequency: nine chapters arranged as three acts of three chapters each, thirty pieces of evidence you can collect, nine puzzles — six plain text fields, two archive searches and one choice — and four endings: Above the List, Blank Master, Names Go Home, and the one you have to take an extra step to reach, The Seventeenth Name. There are also eight night intercepts, each of which lands on your machine as the puzzle it belongs to is solved. The publisher is alphaBETA DEV (GameStrategists), one person, not a company. Those figures live in the game’s own data files — one each for chapters and evidence, puzzles and accepted answers, ending text and the night log — and you can count the same set under src/data/.

Two things are outside this page. First, the pages on the main site gamestrategists.com — this game’s own long page, its three guides, the changelog — carry their own terms of service; where the two disagree, the subdomain you are actually playing on wins. Second, there is no second distribution channel: outside the browser you cannot get this one. Checked on 2026-11-03 against the catalogue data for all nineteen titles, only three carry a store link (Dajin Fitness Rush, Room 404 and Mr Qi Win Win Win); Midnight Frequency is not among them. So there are no “store-side installation, refund or content rating” questions for this page to answer; that is the store’s own desk.

Free, ad-funded, and how that balances

Nothing here costs money: no sign-up, no in-app purchases, no paid chapters, no payment method to attach. Since no money comes in, there is nothing to refund — a dispute about whether the fourth ending was “worth the walk” has no object here: nobody can hand you money back, and nobody can undo a choice you made.

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 own home page does load one Google ad script (sampled on 2026-11-03 across all 21 domains: exactly one each), but the manual slot under the title screen is switched off in this repository’s own source (const ADS_ENABLED = false in src/App.vue): in three real-browser rounds that same day, the intro screen and the screen after entering each showed 0 visible boxes labelled as advertising, and the DOM held a single 0×0, hidden ad container — a standby element the ad loader inserts itself, not a slot we placed. When this account can actually serve and the slot really opens, the two sentences above get corrected with it. Which ad is chosen is the ad network’s decision; we neither see it nor pick it. How ads target you and how to switch personalisation off is written in the privacy policy, which is the page that governs that.

One more distinction: the ad script is only in the game home page’s HTML. On 2026-11-03 six pages were opened three times each, every time in a fresh session, with every outbound request logged, and the two kinds of page are not one table —

That Cloudflare beacon is injected by the hosting platform into every piece of HTML and deals in aggregate traffic and performance metrics; in the readings it made one POST /cdn-cgi/rum per round. The ad side also produced a POST pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ping this round — once in two rounds, not every round. Every number quoted further down on this page comes from a round of readings like these, or from the game’s own data files — none of it is copied from another page’s wording.

What is on the screen before you begin

This one does ask you to confirm something before it lets you in. The intro screen states that this is a work of interactive fiction about a typhoon, a flood, people missing and a bereavement, but that there is no horror imagery, no jump-scare and no flicker; that if you do not want to carry these themes right now you should leave, and that once inside you can kill the ambience at any time. The line to tick is “I have read the notice above and consent to enter this fictional experience.” Until you do, the “Enter the game” button is disabled. Two real click-throughs on 2026-11-03 gave the same shape: 1 visible checkbox, that button disabled=true before the tick and false after it. The same screen carries the caption “scene illustration, AI-generated, not a photograph,” a language switch, and an expandable “Read the full notice” block holding the fiction statement and the content warning.

Once you are in, the title screen offers five things you can press: a main button (worded “▶ Continue” when a save exists on this machine and “▶ Start” when it does not), a “[ Reset ]”, a “Play tips / Disclaimer”, a “Related files”, and one sound button that carries only an accessibility label and no text — before you press it that label reads “Turn ambience off,” after the press it reads “Turn ambience on.” There are no audio files in this game; every sound is synthesised in the browser with Web Audio, and that audio context is not created until you have made one real gesture. Before that gesture the site holds no audio node at all and asks you for no permissions. To walk the whole thing in silence, that button is on the title screen.

This is a single-player work: there are no other players, no chat, it never asks you to identify yourself, and there is no form on the page that could be submitted (measured 2026-11-03: 0 form elements, and the only input is that checkbox on the intro screen). It is not intended for children under thirteen.

What your machine stores, and what gets cleared

This site writes five keys on your device, each doing one job, all of them browser-side:

• arg-intro-midnight-frequency — only whether you have seen the subject-matter notice on the intro screen; its value is 1. It lands the moment you press “Enter the game”.
• midnight-frequency-save — how far this run has got. Seven fields (view, chapter, solved, clues, ending, lang, pendingAct). What gets written is wrapped in a { body, sum } envelope where sum is an FNV-1a fingerprint of body; it exists only to tell us whether the save was hand-edited, is not used for any security purpose, and cannot prove you were the one who saved it.
• mf-audio — two values only, 0 and 1, recording your choice about sound; while this device has no entry for it the default is on.
• mf-endings — which echoes this device has heard (ending and date). The paragraph below about the reset button says why that one is left alone.
• mf-night-log — which of the eight night intercepts you have heard; only ids that are actually registered count.

Merely opening the site writes nothing: two cold rounds on 2026-11-03 went through landing, ticking the notice, pressing “Enter the game”, pressing “Start”, five clicks on the “click to continue” line and a spacebar press, and every reading in that sequence held only arg-intro-midnight-frequency — that single intro key, dropped the moment you enter; the progress key never appeared. Progress is not written on every click. What a real click did show is that pressing the language switch on the intro screen (EN or 中文) writes midnight-frequency-save at once, because the interface language is itself one of its fields. This game’s own code contains no fetch, no XMLHttpRequest, no sendBeacon and no WebSocket; the two non-GET requests measured above came from the platform’s statistics script and from the ad loader.

There are two ways to wipe progress that you can actually reach today. The first is the title screen’s “[ Reset ]”, which only appears on screen when a save already exists (differential test on one and the same state: a save seeded with view=home and chapter=4 gives the screen “▶ Continue” plus “[ Reset ]”; with nothing written it gives “▶ Start” and that button is not there). Pressing it raises no confirmation box at all (two rounds: 0 dialogs), and the only key that disappears is midnight-frequency-save — removed outright, not replaced by a fresh opening — while the other four (echoes, night log, mute preference, “seen the intro notice”) stay with their contents byte-for-byte unchanged, so someone chasing the other endings is not forced to replay from the prologue. Recording one untidy edge of the same test: after pressing it the main button still reads “▶ Continue” on screen and only catches up at the next reload. The second way is to clear this site’s site data in the browser, which takes all five keys with it. Play in a private window that keeps no local data and it goes when the tab closes.

What happens to a damaged save was run as two real states, each twice, with matching readings. If the string cannot be parsed it is treated as no save at all: the screen offers only “▶ Start”, the “[ Reset ]” is not there either, and the bad string stays in the key untouched (the 16 characters seeded this round were not cleaned up for us) until some later real write overwrites it. If it parses and carries any one of the field names view / chapter / solved / clues, it is taken for an older bare save and folded into the current format: the screen gives “▶ Continue” plus “[ Reset ]”, and the night-log entry belonging to a puzzle already marked solved is written into mf-night-log as a side effect, which puts an extra night-log button on screen. There is no recovery beyond that fingerprint and no server retry — the response to a damaged save is to start over, not to ship what you had not finished somewhere else and read it back. The privacy policy carries a longer version of that.

What you may do, and what needs asking first

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

Do not attack, disrupt or try to bypass how this site is meant to be read. This site serves static pages only — the server-side code in the deployment does one thing, which is hand the request to the static files (env.ASSETS.fetch(request) is the whole of src/index.js); it reads no cookies, keeps no access log, has no key-value store and no database, and there is no service worker in the build, so nothing offline stays resident on your machine (measured 2026-11-03: 0 registrations). The rule still holds.

Crawlers: this subdomain’s robots.txt allows User-agent: *, contains 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. A previous version of this page told crawlers not to take the site in bulk with search engines exempt — that contradicted the robots.txt on the same domain (measured 2026-11-03: 0 Disallow, 9 named allows), which is why this version says the sentence above instead. Naming those crawlers is so people can find this game and summaries can cite it; it is not a licence to drain the site’s text into a copy of the same site, which is still “redistribution” under the paragraph before this one and still needs asking.

Offered “as is”

This is a personal project maintained in spare time: there is no service-level commitment, no promise that it is always reachable, and no promise that an accepted answer stays accepted. Across the nine puzzles the game lists 25 accepted strings (the frequency question takes four ways of writing 103.9; the name questions accept the pinyin, the spaced form and colloquial address forms such as “老周”). The text layer does two normalisations at the moment you submit: strip leading and trailing whitespace, and lowercase; then it compares against the accepted values that puzzle lists for itself, and the string you typed is discarded afterwards. If we ever correct an accepted value or restructure a chapter, guides already published will no longer match the game as it then is. When that happens the change is recorded, and if we were wrong it is stated and corrected — those two are the promises we can keep; do not expect a third one measured against a commercial service.

Everything relating to this work is recorded in the main site’s changelog, each entry carrying its own date, newest first. This page deliberately does not copy its size: that number changes every time an entry is added, and writing “N entries in total” here would make it a false sentence the next day. Whenever the text of this page really changes, the “Last updated” line at the top moves with it — it is taken from the date this page’s own text was last touched in the version history, not written by hand from a calendar.

We accept no liability for any direct or indirect loss arising from use of this site; its content is for entertainment and reference and is not professional advice. The town of Linwan, the FM 103.9 programme called Night Watch, the tide table and duty log for the night of 14 September 1998, and that list of people unaccounted for together with the row missing from it, are all fiction. They imitate the layout of real institutions and real files so that players make their choices inside an interface of that kind; they stand for no real institution, person or event, and they are not an account of any real disaster. The control-room picture on the opening screen is captioned in-game as a scene illustration generated by AI, not a photograph, and this page does not pretend it is one either.

How this page changes, and where to find me

These terms will change, and there is only one way they change: this page is updated and the date above is replaced. Nothing on this page asks you to click anything, and the browser does not record whether you have read it — the “before you begin” section above says that button exists only on the game’s intro screen, and there is none on any of the five explanatory pages — so “continuing to use this site means you accept the updated terms” has to be read literally: if you keep using it, we take that as acceptance; if you do not accept, close this page, the game will not break and nobody will stop you playing because you had not read it.

Questions about the terms themselves: contact@gamestrategists.com. Anything about personal data goes to privacy@gamestrategists.com, and the privacy policy is the one that governs it. Replies are written by a person; for how long that takes, this site defers to the sentence on the contact page, and this page does not restate a figure — two pages should not carry two different promises about the same thing.