How to play

This is an investigation game. You move between fixed views of rooms, examine things, pick a few of them up, read a great deal, and connect what you have read. There is nothing to outrun and nothing that can kill you.

Moving and looking

Each room is a single view. Things you can interact with are hotspots; hovering or focusing one names it before you commit to anything, so you are never clicking blind.

• Click or tap a hotspot to examine it.
• Exits are marked along the edges of the view and in the map.
• The map shows every room you have entered and lets you jump straight to it. There is no walking time.

Nothing in this game is a pixel hunt. Every hotspot has a visible target of at least forty-four pixels on the shortest side on every screen size, and the full list of hotspots in the current room is available from the room menu, so you can work from a list instead of a picture if you would rather.

The keyboard

The whole game is playable from the keyboard alone.

• Tab and Shift+Tab move between hotspots in the current room.
• Enter or Space examines the focused hotspot.
• Esc closes any panel, document or puzzle.
• J journal, I inventory, B evidence board, M map.
• ? shows the full key list at any time.

The journal

Everything you learn is written into the journal automatically, in the order you learned it, with the room it came from. The journal is the thing to read when you are stuck. It has an Objectives view that tells you what is currently open, and it never tells you the answer.

The inventory

You can carry a small number of physical objects: keys, a torch, a battery, a document, a tape. Objects can be examined closely, and a few of them can be used on each other — a torch and a battery being the obvious pair. If two things combine, examining either of them says so.

The evidence board

The board is where the game actually happens. Evidence files you have found appear as cards; you connect two cards to propose that they are about the same thing. A correct connection writes a deduction into the journal. An incorrect one costs you nothing at all — there is no penalty, no counter and no lockout for a wrong guess.

The board has two modes and they are equivalent:

• Board mode, cards on a corkboard with thread between them.
• List mode, a plain list of files with a "connect to…" control on each one.

Nothing is only achievable in one mode. If red thread on cork is hard to read, use the list; the deductions are identical.

The four things the interface will not do

1. It will not mark a hotspot as exhausted. Some things change after you learn something else.
2. It will not tell you which two cards go together. It will offer a hint that describes the shape of a connection if you ask twice.
3. It will not stop you reaching an ending early. All three endings are real endings.
4. It will not save you from missing something. You can finish Chapter One having found five evidence files. It will be a worse chapter and it will still be an ending.

Saving

The game saves constantly. As a guest that is in your browser; signed in, it is on the server and follows you between devices. There are no save slots to manage and nothing to press.