Floor 13

The game is menu-driven and presents the player with scenarios through reports viewable in the Director General's office each day. Each scenario represents a potential scandal that may hurt the government's popularity if not properly handled by the player. The player interacts with the game by issuing orders to eight different departments which represent the capabilities available to the Director General (such as surveillance, assassination, interrogation, or disinformation) to use those capabilities against individuals, locations, or groups involved in each scenario. Once each day's reports are read and any orders have been issued, the player can advance to the next day to see the results of their orders and the progress of scenarios.

Each scenario is scripted and will generally always proceed in the same way absent the player's intervention (with minor details such as names and pictures of individuals changed), but some of the results of the player's orders are randomised (for example, assassination attempts may fail or interrogation of individuals may or may not reveal particular information). Each individual or group is rated in the reports as to prominence, power, and orientation towards the government, attributes that will affect the likelihood of success of attempted actions taken against them and the likely results on public opinion. Some scenarios have multiple possible resolutions depending on what means the player chooses to use, and may also generate positive press, raising the government's popularity, if handled well.

The player takes on the role of the Director General of the "Department of Agriculture and Fisheries", a non-existent executive agency that conceals a secret police which keeps the government popular by any means necessary. Answering only to the Prime Minister, the Director General has the power to use wiretapping, surveillance, smear tactics, disinformation, burglary, kidnapping, torture, and assassination to keep the government popular with the people.

In addition to the Director General's regular duties suppressing and removing those who threaten the status quo, there is a subplot involving his membership in a secret society called "The Secret Masters of Thoth". These missions, which are received from a "Secret Master" wearing the vestments of an Egyptian pharaoh, involve more bizarre opposition than regular missions; these missions include protecting a fellow member from a Mafia assassination, foiling an attempt to subvert the nation by pod people in key positions, the protection of the Church of the SubGenius from a scandal, and restraining the growing power of the Illuminati, among others.

Computer Gaming World's Charles Ardai called Floor 13 "the most unpleasant espionage game ever made", comparing it to a James Bond fan's reaction to Casino Royale ("It is simply handled poorly"). Beyond disliking the KGB or Gestapo-like "loathsome secret police activity" the game depicted, he wrote of the gameplay that "Hannah Arendt could not have conceived of more banal evil. Floor 13 turns acts of unmitigated cruelty into bloodless, arm's length bureaucratic functions ... a type and quality of gameplay that was obsolete in 1978".

Cara Ellison mentions the game as it appears in the Internet Archive, pointing out that it seems quite modern. It "simulates the detached bureaucracy a totalitarian government would have to put in place to actually control things, making you increasingly aware that this might be why governments recruit such boring rich people"