Privacy: St. Grimsby’s Thaumaturgical

Last updated 11 October 2026. This page covers the game St. Grimsby’s Thaumaturgical, published by Pifer Labs LLC, trading as confused_dev. Pifer Labs LLC is the data controller for this notice. The studio-wide notice, which also covers this website, is at confuseddev.com/privacy.

The short version

The game has no account and no sign-in. It sends us nothing: no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting. It asks for your microphone, because there is a telephone in it that you talk to, and everything it hears stays on your own computer.

Why the game wants a microphone

Two reasons, and they use the same microphone stream. The first is ordinary voice chat with the other players in your session. The second is the Hexcare Line — a wall radio the insurer answers — and a few devices around the ward that listen for a handful of spoken phrases.

Recognition runs on your computer

Speech recognition is done by Vosk, an offline recognizer, with a small English model shipped inside the game, about 68 MB of it. There is no network call, no account and no paid service behind it. Nothing phones home.

It only listens when there is a reason

While you hold the handset and hold the push-to-talk key for it, or while you stand within a few metres of one of the insurer’s listening devices — the terminal alcove, the telephone, the brass horn in the waiting room. Never anywhere else, never in the menus, never ambiently.

It only knows a few dozen words

Digits, yes and no, “representative” and its neighbours, the four policy tiers, the names of the afflictions and their treatments, and a short list of phrases the insurer would rather not hear. Anything else is discarded as unknown. It cannot transcribe a conversation; it is not built to.

Audio is never stored and never sent

The recognizer reads the same microphone stream as the voice chat and keeps none of it. What crosses the network is a token — a word id from that short list — and a confidence number, and only while you are on the line or standing beside a device. Your teammates hear your actual voice through the ordinary voice chat, as they would in any other game.

The telephone mishears you on purpose sometimes, picking a nearby digit or a neighbouring affliction. That is a game rule rather than a recognition failure, and it never changes what is sent beyond the misheard word.

You can switch it off

Settings › Voice Recognition, off. The handset then shows a keypad, the listening devices go deaf, and every treatment can still be authorized by menu. The game remains completely playable.

Multiplayer

Online play connects you either directly to the player hosting the session or, on Steam, through Steam’s Datagram Relay. Your IP address is visible to the host for the length of the session, as it is in any online game, and voice traffic passes between the players rather than being recorded by us. Where Steam carries the connection, Valve’s own privacy policy covers what Steam itself sees.

What stays on your computer

Your settings, your progress and the game’s log file are written to your own computer and are never uploaded. Deleting the game removes them.

What the store tells us

When you buy or download the game, the store handles the purchase and gives us aggregate reports: how many copies sold in a country, how many people played, crash counts. We cannot identify an individual player from them, and the store’s own privacy policy governs what it collects from you.

Children

The game is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see, correct, export or delete information a company holds about you. Since we hold almost nothing about you, the usual answer is a quick one. Write to us and we will deal with it.

Changes

If what the game does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves.

Contact

Pifer Labs LLC, an independent company in the United States.
hello@piferlabs.com