It Started With A Question
What if you were the secret organisation?
Not the soldier on the ground. Not the scientist piecing together the evidence. The person running the whole thing — the budget, the personnel, the cover stories, the decisions nobody else is cleared to make.
What if XCOM met The X-Files, set in 1949, and instead of giving you a clean interface and clear objectives, it gave you a world full of noise and made you figure out what was actually happening?
That question is ShadowOrg.
The Setting
The year is 1949. The Cold War is just finding its shape. Governments are watching each other, building weapons, drawing borders — and somewhere in the background, something else entirely is happening.
Strange lights over three continents. Disappearances that don't fit any pattern the authorities want to acknowledge. Radar contacts that move in ways radar contacts should not move.
Nobody knows what to do about it. Nobody wants to be the government that says it out loud.
So they build something that officially does not exist. A facility in the middle of nowhere. A budget that appears in no public record. A staff of people who, as far as their families are concerned, have taken positions in the private sector.
You are in charge of it.
What Kind Of Game Is This
ShadowOrg is a management and strategy game. You are not playing a character — you are running an organisation.
That organisation operates on several layers simultaneously.
The Globe is your strategic view of the world. UFOs appear, move, and execute missions. Case sites open when they are done. Intelligence arrives through wiretaps, intercepted police frequencies, and monitored local news. You piece together what is happening from fragments, because that is all you are given.
The Base is your home. Built deep underground beneath a legitimate surface cover — in our case, a haulage company that is moderately successful and completely unremarkable, which is exactly the point. You manage construction, energy, living space, budget, and the people who depend on all of it functioning.
Ground Operations are what happens when the Globe produces something you cannot ignore. Your agents deploy. They infiltrate. They observe. And when observation is no longer enough, they act — in a fully turn-based 3D combat system where the environment is destructible, cover matters, and every operative you send in is a person with a history, a skill set, and limits.
Research is what happens to what they bring back. Professor Burg does not speculate. He documents, analyses, and eventually concludes. His conclusions are rarely comfortable.
The Tone
This is not a game about winning a war against aliens.
It is a game about managing the fact that they exist — while a world that does not know about them goes about its business, elects its governments, runs its newspapers, and occasionally notices things it cannot explain and tries very hard to forget.
The horror in ShadowOrg is not jump scares or monster encounters. It is the slow accumulation of evidence. The moment a pattern becomes undeniable. The memo from Chen Wei that states, in precise clinical language, something that should not be possible — and then moves on to the next item.
Your advisors are not tutorial popups. They are people. Burg, who spent seventeen years being right about things nobody wanted to hear. Kolenchkov, who wants to know what he can build with what you recover before anyone has finished asking what it is. O'Brian, who knows exactly how close this organisation came to never existing at all. Briggs, who needs three more pallets of toilet paper and a straight answer about the refrigeration unit. Chen Wei, who notices things and records them and does not share them unless asked.
Each of them has a voice. Literally — they are fully voice acted by people who understood what we were going for, and got it right.
Where This Comes From
13 Floor Games started on the 13th floor of my parents' apartment building. That is where the first conversations happened. That is where the question got asked.
ShadowOrg is our most ambitious project. It is also the one that has existed the longest in the space between "what if" and "actually building it" — and the distance between those two things turned out to be considerable.
We are building it properly. That takes time. This development log exists so you can see the work as it happens — the systems that run, the ones that don't yet, and the ones we haven't started on because three other things had to exist first.
Follow along. Ask questions. Tell us what you think.
The facility is operational. It is not finished. In this analyst's experience, it never really is.
ShadowOrg is in active development by 13 Floor Games. Follow progress here, on YouTube, and in our Discord server.