Where's Waldo. With a rifle.

You don't sneak. You don't pick locks. You don't move. You're already up there.

Below you it's an ordinary day. Traders haggling over the same sack twice. Guards walking loops they've walked a thousand times. A man crossing the square who's late for something. You watch every step of it, because one of them is the contract and nothing on screen is going to tell you which.

No markers. No arrows. No hand-holding.

No glowing outline on your target. No compass pip, no objective ping.

You get a face and a description. After that you're on your own with a crowd. Watch the patrol routes. Watch who defers to who. Notice the man checking his watch too often. The intel is in the world.

The shot is the hard part

At distance, and a wind that shifts while you're still deciding how much drop to account for. There's no undo either — misjudge the hold and the round finds whoever was standing behind him, and now you've killed a market trader in front of his town.

Focus Mode eases it all into slow motion while you settle. It drains as you use it, so the real skill is knowing when to leave it alone.

Then the round lands, and the town starts thinking

Someone finds the body and runs for the nearest guard. If he gets there, the guard keys his radio, and once that call goes out the whole place is moving, your target somewhere in the middle of it, heading for an exit.

So you're always picking who goes first. The witness, while he's still running. The guard, before he reaches the mic. Or nobody, and you take your shot through a street full of people running the wrong way.

Fifty-two faces, ten cities

A city holds thousands of people. Fifty-two of them stand out, and those fifty-two turn up in every city you go to. Same face, new job. The guard you shot in Kandahar is unloading containers in Hamburg. That woman having a row outside a Dubai hotel used to work a refinery in Russia.

Two of them are live on any given contract, picked at random. Hit the right one and the card's yours. Ten cities, so ten cards a face. Fifty-two to a deck, ten decks to fill. Good luck with the full set.

Study the shot after you take it

Every hit is marked on a body you can spin, pan and zoom — where the round went in, and the line it was travelling on when it got there. Target, guard and civilian are colour-coded, so a clean contract and a messy one look nothing alike. Range and accuracy sit beside it.

In development

I'm building this on my own in Unreal Engine 5. The town works. The crowd works. The alert chain and the ballistics are in and getting tuned most days. What's missing is scale — the other cities, the rest of the deck, the extra nests.

Where this is going

Every level has three firing positions. You start with one. The other two belong to The Accountant, a rival sniper who pays you no attention at all and works his own contract against the clock. Put him down and the clock stops.

Multiplayer is the plan. Two players take two nests, The Accountant takes whatever's left, and everyone works the same town from a different angle. You can't shoot each other. You can put a round past a man's ear, though, and watch what it does to his next shot. Only one of you takes the card.

None of that's in the build yet. It's where this is heading.

Wishlist it and you'll know the moment there's something to play.