The project
Who makes this game, and why it looks like this.
Before Help Arrives is a resource of ODERSA, a non-profit association under the French law of 1901 with an educational purpose. It belongs to the Health programme.
A resource, not a launch
ODERSA builds free educational resources, openly licensed, sorted by programme. Before Help Arrives joins the Health programme as one more resource: it has no anniversary, it has a date of last check.
The collection it belongs to has a name and an idea: Before You Believe It, Before Help Arrives. Our territory is the moment before.
The decisions that explain the shape of it
- 1
Zero dependencies
No database, no third-party service, no remote library, no font hosted elsewhere. The whole site is static, its data is embedded in its pages, and the five scripts that run the game weigh less together than one banner image. That is what makes genuine offline play and zero data collection possible.
- 2
Numbers are counted, never copied out
No number on this site is typed by hand into a text. The 20 playable situations, the 140 scenes, the 100 decision points, the 140 actions and the 69 sources are recounted every time the site is built, from the content files, and republished as open JSON.
- 3
No gore, no faces
The scenes are line drawings against a theatre night. No realistic blood, no casualty's face, no fast flashing. The seriousness comes from a sign: a neck marked with a red line, a breathing wave struck through. The beacon flashes less than once a second, far below any photosensitivity threshold.
- 4
The jokes are on the bystander, never on the casualty
Every situation holds at least one joke choice, and it always aims at the person playing: filming the scene for the insurance, asking whether the ambulance will be long because of a meeting. The yellow verdict does not carry only jokes: it also marks the move that is no mistake but stays the second choice, such as chest compressions alone on a drowning casualty. Either way it says this is not the best choice, it costs time on the clock, and the lesson starts again.