Press 9 to Cancel

Your cable company would love to keep you. Forever.

Corecast is a fictional cable provider whose website was built by people who do not want you to go. Press 9 to Cancel is a puzzle game about escaping it: twenty levels of the interface tricks you have met in real life, arranged into one very long afternoon.

Nothing here is real. Corecast does not exist, there is no subscription.

WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO

Find the cancel button. That is the whole game.

It is under a menu called "Advanced Comfort". It is below a fold that keeps moving. It is behind a chatbot named Buddy, who is very sorry you feel that way. It is greyed out until you accept the fine print, and the fine print reveals its rules one at a time, and each rule appears only after you have broken it.

YOUR PATIENCE IS THE SCORE

A meter at the top of the screen tracks how much patience you have left. Fall for a trap and it drops. Reach zero and the game does not end your run — it hands you a Calming Survey, which is itself a set of irritating questions. Corecast never lets you lose. It just makes you stay.

WHAT IS IN IT

- 20 levels, plus a prologue and a bonus level - Dark patterns taken from real interfaces: roach motels, confirmshaming, misdirection, buttons that swap places while you reach for them - Penalty quests you cannot skip: forced breathing breaks, mandatory feedback forms with rules, preferences that repair themselves - 8 trophies for specific acts of stubbornness - New Game+, for anyone who found the first run reasonable - A record of every run: taps, wrong buttons, time served - English and Russian

NO, REALLY

No in-app purchases. No ads. No account. No tracking. No data collected. Works entirely offline. There is nothing here to cancel except the fake thing.

Press 9 to Cancel is a comedy about a real problem.

What’s new

Corecast has reviewed your feedback and made things worse.

Patience now survives closing the app. Force-quitting used to hand back a full meter while keeping every level you had cleared. It doesn't any more.

Running out of patience is no longer free. The Calming Survey returns less of it every time, and from the second collapse onward it also sends you back a level. The run still never ends. It just costs more.

The penalty quests escalate. Breathing breaks get longer. The feedback form demands more characters each time it appears, and it still refuses anything too negative.

Tapping everything to see what sticks now has a price: every third careless tap summons a quest of its own.

Levels 11, 15 and 16 stop explaining themselves after two wrong guesses. Two of them also quietly switch a preference back on while you are looking somewhere else. Once each. You are expected to check your own work.

Fixed: a support bot that never mentioned it could fetch a human, a countdown that kept running behind screens you could not dismiss, and a few places where the keyboard hid the thing you needed to read.