The front door booms shut behind you and a bolt slides home on the far side. You didn’t hear anyone follow you up the drive. Somewhere down the hall is a dead man, a locked desk and three people who all have a very good reason to be somewhere else. The coachman is clear about it: nobody leaves until someone is named.
This is a narrative escape game, a little like a choose-your-own-adventure book that fights back. You read, you choose where to go, and when you hit a lock you have to work out the combination from what you’ve seen. Everything you need is somewhere in the house.
The house
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How to play
- Choose an action from the list under each passage. Earlier passages stay in the log above, slightly faded, so you can scroll back and reread them.
- Locks take typed answers. Capitals, spaces and punctuation don’t matter, so
9:47and0947count the same. - Your notebook collects every clue and key you pick up. On a phone it folds into a button above the story.
- Wrong combinations and wrong accusations each count as a mistake. Neither ends the game.
- Show Hint gives a nudge for the room you’re in. Reading the same room’s hint twice only counts once.
Stuck?
- Look before you fiddle. The foyer has two things worth examining before you go near a lock.
- Take the scratched message literally. Victorian households really did stop their clocks at the minute of a death, and the house you’re in follows the custom.
- Line the alibis up against the clock. At the end, every suspect’s story either fits the minute of death or doesn’t. Motive breaks the tie.
Sources
- Escape room — Wikipedia: the history of the format, from Takao Kato’s Real Escape Game in Kyoto (2007) onward.
- Gamebook — Wikipedia: branching-path fiction, the ancestor of text-based escape games.
- Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective — Wikipedia: the long-running tabletop game of reading clues and naming a culprit.
- 13 Fascinating Victorian Funeral Customs — Ancestry: includes the practice of stopping a household’s clocks at the time of death.
- Four Mourning Customs from the Victorian Era — Winchester Mystery House: more on Victorian mourning rituals, clocks included.