Unit 112

Your father ran a pawn shop in Marlow Gap for thirty years. He left you the keys, a lease, and rent due on the first.

Every Saturday the storage lots sell the units of people who stopped paying. You get one look from the doorway with a flashlight, three sweeps of the beam, then you bid against the regulars by voice. Whatever you win, you haul home, open, and try to sell before the rent comes due again.

The regulars are working the same doors. Dale wants tools. Peg wants antiques and reads the tape on every box. Kip wants electronics and bluffs like it's free. They have their own money, their own rent, and their own reasons, and they remember how you treated them.

Somewhere in this town is unit 112.

What it simulates

A small-town lien-auction and resale economy. Units are packed by people with histories (a contractor, an estate, a kid who moved out, a hoarder), so what is inside follows who rented it. Prices move with the season and with what you have flooded the market with. Rival bidders run their own books and can go under. Your shop has a floor, a back room, a truck and a month. Thieves, lawsuits, families who want something back, and the occasional bag nobody should have left behind all come out of the same system.

How to play

Click inside the open unit to shine the flashlight (three looks per door). Then bid, jump the bid, or pass. Win, haul, open the boxes one at a time. In the shop, put things on the floor, list them online, sell to the dealer, or pay for an appraisal. Customers haggle at the counter. Rent is due the first week of every month. Miss two and you are done.

Controls

Mouse: everything.

Keyboard: Enter or Space continues. Arrow keys aim the flashlight, Space shines it. B bids, J jumps the bid, X passes or backs out. P pauses.

Gamepad: A confirms or shines, B backs out, X jumps the bid, Start pauses.

How it is meant to be played

Solo, with the sound on. A full run to an ending takes a few hours; the game saves itself and picks up where you left it. Several endings, decided by how you treated people along the way.

Free. No account. Runs in the browser, one file, works offline once loaded.

Content: violence (fistfights, a knife), crime themes, references to illegal goods, alcohol references. No gore.

Marlow Gap and everyone in it are made up. The lien-sale rules quoted in the game are Maryland's (Commercial Law 18-504).

Credits

Design, writing and code: mdawg74, with code and text written alongside Claude (Anthropic).

Art: generated with FLUX models through Cloudflare Workers AI, then picked, cut, graded and repainted by hand.

Music and sound: synthesized live in the browser, no samples.

Fonts (SIL Open Font License 1.1): Bangers, Patrick Hand, Comic Neue, Courier Prime.

Built on the developer's own pre-existing browser game code library.