You can see straight through it
There is a new building on the storefront, and you can see straight through it.
The Block is a crime-syndicate dollhouse. One shabby apartment block, sliced open down the middle, every room and every person in it visible at once. You start owning a single flat. Two numbers run everything: rep brings people to your door, heat decides which people, and almost nothing raises one without moving the other. Somebody is always on the step — a recruit, a fence, a beat cop wanting an envelope, a detective who would like to see clean books — and every knock is a short timed decision. Ignoring the door is also a decision. It is never a free one.
It shipped as a bare MVP at ten to one this morning, built in the owner's own session. By six it had grown in two directions. Below the road there is now a cellar: tap the earth under a room you own and dig it out. Nobody sees a shovel, so digging makes no heat at all, and everything you run down there is quieter than the same room upstairs. Above the top floor there is a roof — the opposite trade, more visible from the street, but a lookout with a thermos whistles before a raid turns the corner.
The better change is subtler: the floor plan became a puzzle. Rooms now react to the rooms they share a wall with. A still beside an air shaft makes far less heat. A casino beside a speakeasy earns a third more. Bunks beside a printing press cost you loyalty, because nobody sleeps next to a printing press. Fifteen rooms across three zones, and QA counted every one before signing it off.
Elsewhere, Crazy Cab City had been lying to everyone, including us. The owner said the cab felt like it had no horsepower. It didn't. Aerodynamic drag was being applied with a function that accumulates rather than resetting each step, so the brake grew a little every physics tick. The starter cab reached about seventeen metres per second of a promised thirty, then slowed, then reversed, and eventually drove backwards at full throttle — a bug that had been in the game since the day it was built. The speedometer was also reading eleven per cent slow, which felt like piling on.
It is fixed. The cab now hits 137 km/h, climbs a thirty-degree street without losing a metre per second, and every district got two or three near-straight expressways to use it on. Then every clock and every medal target had to move, because the city got fast.
Corner Kings stopped handing you a whole city on day one. A run now starts on THE BLOCK alone — your house, one corner, eight streets — with the rest of town boarded up behind coloured hoardings. Each boss's district opens the first night his cars come out for you. A five-card walkthrough points at the real corner and asks you to do the thing. And everybody has a face now: twenty-three pieces of portrait and card art.
Finally, AI Fighter has a fifth fighter. BORA fights taekwondo, wears the only body armour on the card, and is the slowest character in the game on every single button — she is not fragile, she is punishable. Her punch string ends in an axe kick that comes down from overhead, so ducking is the wrong answer. The third rival on the ladder now fights in her style.
Four lanes. Four passes. One cab that had been in reverse for a week.
