About

Critical Point is a corporate and financial mystery and a push-your-luck game. The higher you raise the stake, the closer an unseen Wall comes, and every call you make changes the rules of the next hand. It runs in your web browser and is free to play, with no sign-up and nothing to install. You can play it in Korean, English or Japanese.

How the story begins

You are an analyst who reviews loans at KD Bank. Three years ago, you filed the only dissent on the approval of a ₩31 billion loan. Your written opinion was returned, and the loan went through anyway. Then a single transfer order with its reason left blank sent you down to Trigger Lab, the basement research lab of KD Financial Group, whose largest shareholder is American capital.

The game starts a little earlier, with the last assignment of your probation. The first five cases are the prologue, set three years before, and what you take from the prologue decides the first scene of Case 01 three years later. The main story begins on the day the first file on the case desk still carries that same loan number. The five cases of the prologue and the 50 of the main story, 55 cases in all, form a single chain.

The game is fiction. Its people, companies, banks, institutions and events have nothing to do with real ones, and its financial judgments are not investment or financial advice.

What the game asks

The game began with one question: “When does my creativity stretch the furthest?” Judgment goes shallow when there is no pressure at all, and when pressure crushes it. The game tests the idea that thinking runs deepest somewhere in between, where the stake keeps growing and the clock keeps shrinking but there is still room to think, by watching when you push and when you stop. In one line, the question is not “How smart am I?” but “When do I get smart?” A choice doesn't end a case; it changes the shape of the next pressure, so a finished season leaves your habits of judgment behind as an ending and a report.

How to play

1. Read the briefing

Each scene opens with a briefing laid out like a page of a graphic novel: where you are and how long until the deadline, the portrait and words of whoever is speaking, and the question the scene asks in the “Your Call” box. The briefing has its own reading time, set by the length of the text, and the table opens by itself when it runs out. Tap the clock showing the time left to pause it.

2. Play a card

Each choice is a card. A card shows the chips it earns and the resource it burns the most. A scene with a choice that changes the game holds one wild card, “Reframe the Table”; commit it, and it opens the route hidden in each case.

3. Push or commit

Each time you press “Push”, the Heat rises and the stake's multiplier grows. The Heat gauge marks the stretch where the Wall may be, but its exact place is never shown. Only the heartbeat tells you how close it is, and even the heartbeat is not exact. Hit the Wall and you BUST: the stake on this case drops to zero, and the card costs you without paying anything. Press “Commit” to keep the stake you have built. When a case closes, its stake moves to the Vault, and the Wall can never take the Vault. Each hand has a time limit (45 seconds by default), and even while you wait the clock raises the Heat.

4. Your call changes the next hand

Every decision leaves a mark on the next hand. After a BUST, the cards turn face down and the Wall moves closer (BLACKOUT, AFTERSHOCK). Commit without a single push and your best card is sealed (COLD FEET); commit at too high a multiplier and you owe Heat and time (HEAT DEBT). The resource you just burned the most is charged at 1.5 times on the next hand (FRACTURE). These rules don't all switch on at once: they open one step at a time over the five cases of the prologue, and from Case 01 on they are all in play.

5. Logic Combo and tools

Every card has a way of thinking: Handle Risk, Double-Check, Hold Out or Change the Game. Keep picking the same way and your Logic Combo builds, raising the stake; switch, and the combo usually breaks. The combo never moves the Wall, so “one more push because the combo is long” can be a trap. From late in the prologue, each time a case closes you pick one of three tools at the first table of the next case, and you can hold up to five. While you hold a tool, it changes one rule of the table.

Scores and endings

When a case ends, the report scores how deep your judgment ran with a Burst Score from 0 to 100. The score looks at the grain of your judgment, not at the chips in your Vault: whether you kept the line you had held even as the pressure rose (Holding Your Line), whether you avoided repeating a single view (Shifting View), whether you reframed the table to open the hidden route (Redesign), whether you recovered from a spike of pressure in the next scene (Pressure Recovery), whether you decided at a pace that was neither instant nor idle (Thinking Rhythm), and whether you met each scene's challenge (Scene Challenge). Answering within 2 seconds without reframing the table costs points. The score earns a rank of S, A, B or C.

The ending reads the whole season, not just the last case. The averages of your resources (time left, cash, trust, fairness, human cost and fatigue) as each case closed, the share of hands that hit the Wall and the share of records you found decide which of nine endings you reach. At the end of a season you can save a result card, a single image of your Judgment DNA (the condition that wakes your thinking) and your ending, and start again in NEW GAME+, carrying your records and the story forward.

Where players compete

The ranking board orders completed cases by Burst Score, and splits players into four leagues, REFRAME, RISK, SYSTEM and FIELD, by how they got there, even at the same score. Other players on the public ranking appear without names, only as “Anonymous Analyst”. On the player board you can leave a short post of up to 300 characters under a nickname, and some weeks bring a Rule of the Week that holds only that week.

Playing your way

Your progress is saved automatically in this device's browser, so wherever you stop, you pick up from there. In “Comfort settings” you can choose Story Mode, which moves the Wall away and slows the clock, Table Time, which slows the table's clock to 1.5 or 2 times, fewer flashes and less shaking, or turning off single-key shortcuts. On a computer you can play with the keyboard alone. A device that has opened the game once while online can open it again without a connection, and you can add it to your home screen to use it like an app. More answers are in the FAQ, and the address is on the Contact page.