A robot has to reach a locked door. Four of you are going to get it there one move at a time. One of you is going to make sure it never does.
A party game where everyone shares one robot
Bad Signal plays like a Jackbox night with a platformer running underneath it. The TV shows a 2D grid level and a single beat-up robot. Everyone joins from their phone by scanning a QR code on screen. Nothing to download, no controllers to dig out, no accounts to make. Get four people in a room and you are playing in under a minute.
Everyone moves. Nobody owns up to it.
Each round, every player secretly picks one move: jump, left, right, or down. The moves lock, then play out on the TV in a random order, one after the other. You see what happened in the first slot, the second, the third and the fourth. You do not see who picked what. So when the robot takes one step left and drops into a pit, was that a fat thumb, a panic, or a plan? That is the whole argument.
One of you is the traitor
At the start of the match one player is secretly made the traitor, and they keep it for the entire game. Most of their damage is just an ugly move buried in the shuffle, but they also carry tools:
- Override quietly swaps any player's move for one of the traitor's choosing.
- Jam kills the detective's reveal for the round and lets the whole table know a power went off.
- Frame hands the detective a convincing lie instead of the truth, and says nothing at all.
Each tool runs on a cooldown, so a good traitor saves the knife for the moment it costs you the most.
The innocents push back
Every round one innocent is quietly handed the detective's badge and gets a single private look at one player's real move. Solid evidence, as long as the traitor did not jam it (you learn nothing) or frame it (you learn a lie and repeat it with full confidence). The other innocents each hold one Encrypt for the whole game. Spend it to lock in a tamper-proof move, and if the traitor tries to override you, the override fails and the entire room is told that someone's signal was tampered with. Now everybody knows a traitor acted this round, and exactly who they went after.
It is still a real platformer
The robot has weight. A jump lifts it three cells, but the moment it is airborne, every sideways step drags it down a cell, so clearing a gap means arcing your jump against the width of the pit instead of floating across. Spikes and pits are lethal, but dying is not losing. The robot wakes back up at its last checkpoint. What it actually costs you is the round you spent getting there, and rounds are the one thing in this game you can never earn back.
Talk, accuse, vote
When the dust settles you argue it out, then you vote. Get almost the whole table behind one name and that player is benched for the next round, dropping the robot down to three moves instead of four. Bench the wrong person and you have crippled yourselves. Bench nobody and the traitor keeps a hand on the wheel. All the while the round counter keeps draining. Reach the door and the innocents win. Hit zero first and the traitor takes the match. Win or lose, the traitor's name goes up on the screen at the end, so you always find out how badly you read the room.
Features
- Hidden-traitor social deduction wrapped around one shared platforming puzzle
- Built for four players in the same room, where talking is your sharpest tool
- Phone-as-controller over a QR code, nothing to install on anyone's device
- Anonymous move order that turns a single bad step into a full-table argument
- Traitor powers (Override, Jam, Frame) against innocent counters (the Detective's reveal and Encrypt)
- Checkpoints, spikes, pits and a hard round budget that makes every wasted move hurt
- A built-in level editor: paint your own stages and playtest them on the real game engine
