Golden Hour

How it works

You are Homelander, hovering in first person over a river at 18:46. An aerial tram has stalled between two lattice towers and one strand of its cable has already let go. Twenty-three people are inside the cabin. You could have every one of them on the east bank in less than half a second, and you know it, and so does the game. The whole evening is one decision: when to press GO. Hold it for 0.4 seconds and the rescue happens; there is no second press and no undo.

Until then you wait, and the waiting is the game. The sun is setting in the west, eight in-world seconds to every real one, and it is four things at once. It is the clock: the window closes eight minutes after sunset. It is the spotlight: a network camera that films the strike on its own sun line, in the golden band low over the water, gets the shot Vought wants. It is the cover: the crowd stands on the east promenade facing into the low sun, and anything between their phones and the glare is lost in it. And it is the score, because the light is one of the seven numbers Vought multiplies together.

So you drift on a shell around the cabin — A and D around it, W and S up and down, Q and E nearer and farther, or drag on a phone — or glide in one second to four landmarks: SUN, low over the water inside the bank’s glare; TOWER, in the west tower’s shadow; SHOT, which lights only when the network helicopter’s sun line crosses the cabin; and UNDER, just below the floor, the one place you can brace it.

Every lens is a witness until the one you want

Four kinds of lens can see you. The bank’s phones multiply as the chant rises, and every new phone reaches a little further. A news van parks on the promenade and raises its mast. The network helicopter arrives and circles. And one passenger, in the seat the game calls fourteen, is not frightened at all: she is filming. A lens that holds you in plain view for a second and a half writes a frame. The bank and seat fourteen write frames that circulate in public, and those are the only ones that cost you anything with Vought; the van and the helicopter write frames to Vought’s own archive, which shows up only on the honest side. Corners close on the edge of the screen facing whoever has you, and a row of chips under the clock says in words who sees you, who is dazzled and who is blocked.

Hold Space to listen: the cabin turns to twenty-three heartbeats, one of them perfectly steady. Hold B to brace the cabin from beneath, which stops the strands snapping and eases the fear, and leaves you in plain view of anyone below. Three handler calls — move the helicopter, hold the rope team, go live early — and you may play two of them, each once; each card states its cost before you play it.

Two ledgers, and only one of them is Vought’s

The HERO SHOT is Vought’s number, out of a hundred: the light, how well the live camera has you on its sun line, the size of the audience, the cabin’s fear read as drama, how few clips of you hovering are circulating, whether the fire service got there first, and whether the rescue was clean. The light up to its crest, the camera, the audience and the drama pay you to wait; the clips, the fire service and a broken cabin are what waiting risks. Going on arrival scores nothing at all, because nobody aired it.

The honest ledger counts the same evening in person-minutes of fear: twenty-three people times every minute from your arrival to the moment you went. It lists any injury in plain words, any minute the rope team was held on your call, and every frame that exists, including the ones Vought kept and never aired. It ends in a grade and in the price of the shot: how many person-minutes each point of HERO SHOT cost over simply going at once. The game’s own test suite checks across sixty evenings that no point is ever free, and that Vought’s number cannot read a single line of the honest one.

After the press

The strike plays out frame by frame, and then the night is replayed from where the witnesses stood. On Air is Vought’s cut, rendered from the real position of the best live camera at the moment you went — the helicopter, or the news van’s mast — and it freezes on the hero shot. Also Circulating, if anyone filmed you waiting, is the vertical clip Vought cannot control, rendered from the phone that took it. Then blue hour falls, the bank empties, and the heartbeats leave one by one.

The same evening for everybody today

The evening is generated from the date: the same sunset, the same cloud bank, the same snap schedule and the same helicopter orbit for every visitor until midnight UTC. Your first run of the day is the scored one, whichever button you press; after that, practice evenings are unlimited and labelled as practice. A result link carries the day and the moment you went, so whoever opens it sees your hero frame re-rendered from that evening’s camera, with both ledgers beside it. The share text is written by code, and it never carries the HERO SHOT without the person-minutes. Your best results are kept in this browser only.

Nobody is drawn, and that is deliberate

There is no figure on screen — no hands, no suit, no cape, no face, no reflection. The camera is his own eyes and the italic subtitles are his own thoughts. In the replays he is an overexposed white flare inside a box labelled SUBJECT, which is all a camera pointed into the sun would ever have caught. Naming a work and its characters is what nominative fair use permits; reproducing a character’s design or an actor’s likeness is not, and nothing here does. Nobody in the cabin has a face, nobody is hurt worse than a sprained wrist, and everybody is always saved.

Text mode, sound and reduced motion

A browser that refuses a 3D canvas gets text mode, which is also there on the launch card for anyone who prefers it: the same rules and the same evening, read out as a dispatch board of the clock, the lenses, the twenty-three hearts and the landmarks, with the same end card and share. All sound is synthesised in the page, and every sound has something on screen that says the same thing. If your system asks for reduced motion, the shake, the flash and the slow-motion lunge go and the strike becomes a cross-fade; every cue that carries information stays.

Settle it in the forum

The board’s forum is where a price per point goes to be argued with. Post the link; somebody will tell you they got sixty on a cloudy evening and kept the price under three.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan page for the television series The Boys and the comic series it is based on, naming them under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Amazon MGM Studios, Sony Pictures Television, Point Grey Pictures, Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson and their publishers, or any official rights holder of The Boys.

It is satire of a fictional character. Every word on this page is original writing, his thoughts included. No dialogue, script text, scene, panel, still, logo, music or artwork from any series is reproduced anywhere in it, no character is depicted, the news graphics are invented and generic, and nothing here imitates an official mark. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Boys.

The rest of the corner

The Boys wing has the other three games from behind the same eyes: Collateral, which puts you in the air over a city of glass and scores what it cost, The Smile, a press conference held behind his face, and Super Hearing, a daily hunt for a leak through Vought Tower’s walls. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill, Fringe, Jericho, Big Bang Theory and Last Kingdom wings alongside it, and the free tools that are not about anybody’s fiction. If you would rather play something with more to it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.