Mayday

Mayday puts you behind the radar of an authoritarian air-traffic-control tower. An unauthorized aircraft is falling, official orders are suspect, and you have 300 seconds to inspect the evidence and decide whose story gets a safe landing.

What is Mayday?

The setup compresses a desk thriller into one shift. As an air traffic controller in fictional Ostrovnia, you watch radar and weather, work the radio, and comb through websites, magazines, papers, and objects for clues about the state around you. The aircraft has five minutes left, so every scrap of context competes with the countdown. First-person movement and fiddly control-panel interactions give the investigation a physical workplace, while the central choice asks whether procedure is still virtuous when the institution writing it may be lying. It is a prototype, but the premise understands that uncertainty is more unnerving when it arrives through official channels.

What you can do there

• Monitor radar and weather
• Communicate with an unauthorized aircraft
• Inspect documents and websites
• Choose whether to follow orders or intervene

Why we picked it

The timer does more than create urgency: it forces a moral decision before the player can make the evidence feel comfortably complete. Turning research, radio work, and bureaucracy into the pressure points of a short game gives this little tower a surprisingly wide political horizon.

How to get the most from it

Read the posted controls before starting, then divide your five minutes between the radar, weather, radio, and nearby documents. Notice which claims come from official material and which come from the pilot; the interesting part is deciding how much uncertainty you can tolerate before acting.

Good to know

Mayday is an English-language Unity prototype with keyboard and mouse controls, subtitles, partial voice acting, and a free browser build. Older comments reported launch trouble in Brave and a camera inversion bug; the creator marked the camera issue fixed and later shipped additional fixes, but current cross-browser performance and accessibility were not tested.

Who made it, and when?

Fabian Evers and collaborators is the credited creator or organization. The earliest supported launch date we found is July 13, 2025. A documented update was recorded July 19, 2025.