ABOUT

The Scope Creep

A project management based interactive narrative nightmare.


--- OVERVIEW

The Scope Creep is a digital experience that transforms the horrors of creative project management into an interactive fiction experience. Players take on the role of a project manager trying to keep a cursed agency brief on track, as the Creep slowly assumes control of both the work and your mind. It's part satire, part psychological horror, and entirely too close to home for anyone who's worked in the creative industry.

While the game is playful on the surface, it explores the deeper tension between control and chaos that defines most creative work. It's a reflection of those moments when ambition collides with burnout, when deadlines blur into delirium, and when the thing you're building starts to feel like it's building you.

It’s is a love letter to project managers everywhere. For anyone who’s ever fought to deliver something great, and for every time the project’s fate felt entirely out of your hands.

The deadline’s waiting. It’s time to deliver the work, at all costs.


--- HOW IT WORKS

The game is structured in a sort of ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style of interactive fiction. Players are dropped into an ominously vague creative project rumoured to be cursed. Each round represents a project sprint where the player is presented with a recognisable creative industry scenario – from endless amends and shifting goalposts to crushing client pivots, power outages and staffing issues.

In order to progress, each scenario demands a decision to be made under mounting pressure. Decisions are presented as a limited hand of three cards each with a pre-defined action to take, hinting at the games overarching illusion of control. The ultimate catch is that whatever you chose, the outcome is always, in some way, inevitable.

The game continues in an infinite loop, only ending when the player chooses to quit. The longer you play, the more your mental integrity collapses, ultimately affecting the entire experience. Visual effects intensify and become more erratic, sound increases in intensity, and the language becomes more unhinged as you, the player, descend into an state of delirium. The scenarios themselves grow stranger and more absurd as you progress deeper into the project and lose more control to the Scope Creep.

When you finally decide to quit, you're presented with a tarot-style card that speaks to the possible cause of your ultimate project failure. This outcome is determined by the choices you made during your play session. Whether those choices ever truly mattered is another question entirely.


--- LANGUAGE AND TONE

The visual language was designed to sit somewhere between retro horror paperback and modern digital interface. It’s tactile and physical without being nostalgic to the point of cliché. The red and black palette combined with a heady mix of noise and glow helps instantly telegraph the tone. A visual homage to Stranger Things, which re-wrote the book on 80’s horror remix (itself of course a homage to Stephen King’s book covers). But with enough moments to ensure players understand this is satire, not something harrowing. The experience had to feel playful beneath the dread.

The typography does some of the heavy lifting here. We chose Forevs by OH no Type Co as the hero font, a typeface that takes James Edmondson's signature expressive style and combines it with the haunting associations of ITC Benguiat. Since so much of this would be text-driven, having a visual tone of voice like Forevs helps indicate that small element of satire without undermining the unease.

Linguistically, the game begins as straight with a hint of irreverence before morphing into surreal dark comedy, eventually reaching a writing style evocative of H.P. Lovecraft, if he’d have worked in a digital agency. As the Creep tightens its grip, background smoke intensifies, audio grows oppressive, and the language becomes increasingly unhinged. Eyes appear as recurring motifs in interstitial screens, progressively transforming into something monstrous as the player deteriorates.


--- OUTCOME

The Scope Creep launched as a fully browser-based and responsive single-page application supporting endless looping through random scenario selection and mood-dependent variations, ensuring almost no two playthroughs feel identical.

The tone found its audience immediately – creative professionals sharing it with the nervous laughter of recognition, tagging colleagues with "this is too real" reactions.

Beyond the experience itself, The Scope Creep functions as a portfolio centrepiece and brand positioning tool for us at Wondermake. It demonstrates our narrative design capability, UX craft, and conceptual ambition while reinforcing the studio's identity as culturally literate, slightly irreverent, and comfortable operating between satire and sincerity.

Perhaps the experience's sharpest insight involves recognising that surrendering control isn't necessarily catastrophic. Creativity resists being fully systematised – sometimes you just have to surrender to it and see what comes out the other side. The Scope Creep transforms this anxiety into something playable, something shared, something almost enjoyable in its familiar horror.

It's not a real descent into hell. It's just work.


--- RESULTS

After just 2 months:

The Scope Creep has been played over 34,304 times, with an average play time of about 4 minutes.

Players have endured around 983 hours, collectively battling The Scope Creep. That’s 41 days of time we can never get back.

Players have survived over 107,200 cursed sprints, with the average player calling it quits after Sprint 7. One, clearly unhinged, person made it to Sprint 145. Someone should probably check if they’re alright

Players have sent a combined total of 1,765 Interns on a doomed, but desperate, coffee run. You heartless bastards.

The most popular action of choice was to ‘Request consolidated feedback’ feedback from the client. So, just like real life I suppose.


--- CREDITS

All creative direction, copywriting, sound design, visual design and development by Jonny Gibson, Josh Gowen and Sam Beddingfield.

Additional tarot card and promotional poster illustrations by Ollie Hoff.