HLB

HOW TO PLAY

A mock interview scored like an RPG. The AI reads your job description, becomes the interviewer, and turns every answer into damage — in one direction or the other. Any field works: nursing, teaching, sales, trades, finance, engineering. The boss comes from your JD, not from a fixed question bank.

The loop

  1. Paste a job description and pick a difficulty in the lobby.
  2. The AI generates a boss persona from that JD and opens with a real question.
  3. You pick an action and answer. The judge grades it and assigns damage.
  4. Every third question is a quickfire round: four options, one clearly best.
  5. The boss asks a harder follow-up. Repeat until someone hits 0 HP.
  6. You get an XP score plus per-answer coaching notes — win or lose.

Actions

ANSWER

The standard attack. Answer the question straight. Graded on clarity, confidence, depth and relevance to the job description.

0–40 to the boss

STAR STRIKE

Commit to Situation, Task, Action, Result. Real structure lands a critical hit — a STAR Strike without a result is punished harder than a plain answer.

25–40 on a hit, brutal counter on a miss

CLARIFY

Ask a sharp question back instead of answering. A relevant clarifier chips the boss and buys you a better question. A lazy one still gets countered.

5–10 chip damage

QUICKFIRE (MULTIPLE CHOICE)

Every third question arrives as four answers instead of a blank box. One is clearly the strongest; the other three are mistakes candidates for this job really make. Pick one and it is graded like any other answer.

Best option crits, weak option gets countered

COFFEE

Two per run. The judge tells you what a great answer to the current question would cover. No damage either way — the question stays on the board.

0 damage, 2 uses

Damage table

RatingEarned whenEffect
CRITICAL_HITSpecific, structured, evidence-backed, on target25–40 damage to the boss
HITCorrect but shallow, vague, or missing impact10–20 damage to the boss
COUNTER_ATTACKWeak, off-topic, evasive or empty15–30 damage to you

Damage is clamped server-side, so the AI cannot invent a one-shot kill. Difficulty then scales it: hits and counters are multiplied before they reach your HP bar.

Difficulty

  • Intern run

    Forgiving grader. Your hits land harder.

  • Normal

    Fair interviewer. Fluff still gets punished.

  • Nightmare

    Brutal grader. Counters hurt, hits chip.

Difficulty changes both how strictly the judge grades and how hard the numbers hit.

Boss roster

The Architecture Tyrant

Depth. Trade-offs, failure modes, and what you would do differently.

The Metric Gatekeeper

Business impact. Numbers, scope, and who was affected.

The Culture Auditor

Behavioural evidence. Real conflicts, real outcomes, no hypotheticals.

The Velocity Fanatic

Ownership and speed. What you shipped alone and how fast.

Tactics

  • Lead with the answer, then the evidence. The judge rewards the first sentence carrying the point.
  • Quantify everything you can — 'cut average patient wait time from 40 minutes to 12' or 'grew renewals 18%' beats 'improved things'.
  • Name the trade-off you rejected. It reads as judgement, not as recital.
  • If the question is genuinely ambiguous, CLARIFY once. Twice in a row reads as stalling.
  • Save your coffees for the question you would freeze on in a real interview.
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