Privacy Policy

Room 404 (https://room404.gamestrategists.com)

In one line

This site never asks you to sign up and never asks for an e-mail address, phone number, location or anything that identifies who you are. Which act you reached, which puzzles you solved and what you typed into the notepad live only in your own browser’s localStorage. There is no copy on a server, we cannot read it, and we cannot restore it for you.

The save file

Progress is written to a single key, room404-save, and its fields are exactly what the game needs to pick up where you left off: the site and page you are on, the e-mails you have read, the clues you hold, the puzzles you solved, the tenants you have looked at, the current act, the ending you reached, the text in your notepad, and the interface language.

Three further keys each mind one narrow job: arg-intro-room404 records only “you have already seen the opening notice”, which decides whether it appears again; arg-audio-room404 records whether the ambience is muted; gs_achievements stores the badges you were handed on an ending screen so they can be drawn on the next one.

There are three ways to erase them and all three do the same thing: the “Restart” control on the title screen (it asks once before deleting), clearing site data for this domain in your browser, or opening the site in a private mode that does not keep local data. Nothing can bring the save back afterwards — that is the other side of “we do not hold your data”.

Advertising

The site loads the Google AdSense ad script. Ad requests go to pagead2.googlesyndication.com and googleads.g.doubleclick.net, and to the ad-quality endpoints ep1.adtrafficquality.google and ep2.adtrafficquality.google. Google and its ad vendors may use cookies or similar identifiers (for example DSID) to serve, limit and measure ads, and may serve personalised ads based on your browsing history. Whether an ad actually comes back, and which one, is decided by Google and its vendors; when nothing comes back no ad image appears on the page, and this site does not fill an empty slot with something else.

You can turn personalised advertising off in Google ad settings, read the vendor cookie explanations and opt-outs at aboutads.info, or block and clear third-party cookies in your browser. None of these choices affect whether the game can be finished; the ads simply become less relevant.

Where the sound and the pictures come from

The ambience is synthesised on your own machine with Web Audio: a layer of brown noise under a 260 Hz low-pass filter, two sustained drones at 50 Hz sine and 100 Hz triangle, the filter’s cutoff pushed back and forth by an oscillator with a period of roughly 33 seconds, and a knock, a hum or a page turn inserted at random every 12 to 24 seconds. No audio files are downloaded, and the audio context is not even created until you touch a control connected with sound.

Every image in the game — the cover, the tenant photographs, the evidence scans, the server-room diagram — is served from room404.gamestrategists.com itself. Nothing is fetched from a third party for pictures, and nothing is fetched from a third party for fonts.

Hosting and traffic measurement

Pages are delivered and protected by Cloudflare, which keeps routine request logs (path, timestamp, a digest of the user agent) to keep the service running and to block abuse. They are not used to build a profile of a person.

Every HTML response also carries the hosting platform’s web-analytics script, a beacon from static.cloudflareinsights.com. It reports aggregate page-view and page-performance metrics to Cloudflare only; it sets no cookie, collects no identifying data, and we cannot read its per-visitor detail. Both of these are handled by Cloudflare under its own policy — see the Cloudflare Privacy Policy.

Third parties

Measured on 30 October 2026 with a real browser: the home page was opened and left for seven seconds while every outbound request and every cookie in the browser was recorded, and two runs agreed. The site sends requests to only two kinds of third party — Google advertising (the four domains above) and Cloudflare (hosting and traffic measurement, above). In the same runs the site itself wrote no cookie at all; the only one present was the ad-side test_cookie@.doubleclick.net.

Aside from those two, the site runs no Google Analytics or other first-party analytics, loads no Google Fonts, has no social plugins, and keeps no forms, comments or on-site search. If another service is ever introduced, this page is corrected before it goes live.

Children

The game is a horror mystery and is not directed at children under 13. It asks no player of any age for identity details or contact information. Ad serving and personalisation are handled by Google under its own policies; a parent can switch personalised ads off through the two links under “Advertising”.

Controller and contact

This site is the personal project of an indie developer, alphaBETA DEV (GameStrategists): there is no account system, no file of personal data that could be pulled up, and no switch that could be thrown against one particular person. Questions about this policy, and any request to access, correct or delete, should go to privacy@gamestrategists.com.

When the text of this page changes, the “Last updated” date above changes with it — that date is taken from the day this page’s text was last actually revised in version control, not typed in by hand.