The Illuminated

The Illuminated is a record-label tycoon about the ordinary work of building a music business - scouting artists, negotiating contracts, hiring producers, choosing a genre and a theme, laying out nine craft sliders, picking the channels a record ships on, and shipping it into a week that other labels are also shipping into. The charts are real: your records and your rivals' enter the same Top 40, and release timing matters because crowding is a number.

Every decision has two axes. The fast route and the clean route both work, and they cost different things. Marketing money buys reach with diminishing returns. A bigger record earns a longer tail and is judged more harshly when it misses. A neglected mixing console quietly caps what your studio can service. Nothing here is a slot machine; the sliders are decisions, and the game keeps a ledger of every one of them.

And underneath the business, something else is keeping score.

Five acts. As the label grows, the office changes around you - the ferns and the gold records come down, and other things go up. There are politicians who can be bought, stories that can be buried, rites that confer standing, and four powers who will claim a label that asks. There is also, throughout, a way to refuse. Refusing is slower and poorer and it is a real road, with its own ending.

FEATURES
- A full label simulation: artists, staff, contracts, equipment chains, marketing, touring, merch and a weekly Top 40 with rival labels.
- 150 hand-written decision cards, each set in a painted room.
- Five acts with an office that visibly corrupts as they turn.
- Multiple endings decided by what you actually did, not by a menu.
- Isometric pixel art, hand-tuned for a phone screen.

NO STRINGS
- No ads. No in-app purchases. No subscriptions.
- No account, no login, no internet permission - the app cannot phone home because it has no way to.
- Plays entirely offline. Saves stay on your device.

Contains mature themes: occult ritual, corruption. Rated for players 16 and over.