The overture runs three minutes. At the end of it the curtain goes up on a corpse, and then it runs again.

You are the prompter, in the hooded box at the lip of the stage. Nobody looks at you and nobody stops you, and you are the only person in the building who can be everywhere except where it matters. When the loop resets you keep nothing: no levels, no money, no equipment. You keep what you worked out.

The company is not a script

Five of them move through the backstage on real schedules. Each has somewhere to be by a given bar, and each one re-routes when a door is bolted, when a lamp is out, when a prop is missing from where they left it. Play the same three minutes twice without touching anything and you will see the same three minutes. Touch one thing and the rest of the night bends around it.

That is the whole design. Interfering is the only way to make the next loop show you something the last one did not.

You cannot be everywhere

Nine rooms across a cutaway of the house: the flies, the grid, the wardrobe, the wings, the stage, the green room, the trap room, the prop store, and your own box. You see the room you are standing in. Next door you can hear that somebody is there and not who. Everywhere else is dark.

One hundred and eighty seconds. Five people. Choose.

Earn your verbs

You begin able only to WATCH. Facts you personally witness go into the casebook, and the casebook is what pays for everything else — FOLLOW, then BOLT a door, then DOUSE a lamp, then PALM what somebody is going to need, and finally CUE: a line whispered from the box to whoever is on the boards, which only works if you give it on the right bar.

Winning is not naming them

It is being in the right place at the right bar to stop it happening at all — and being able to say whose hand it was. Opportunity, motive and method, all three witnessed, or the accusation is a guess and the game will not let you make it.

There are three possible culprits and the case changes. Solve it and you are dealt a new company with a new secret.

Nothing is ever lost

Your casebook is written to browser storage the moment each fact is recorded, not at the end of a loop. A loop that goes wrong costs you the loop. Closing the tab costs you nothing at all. There is no restart in this game, only the next time round.

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Free, plays in the browser, no install. Arrow keys to move, letters for verbs, TAB for the casebook. Mouse and touch both work: tap an adjacent room to go there, tap a verb to use it.

Hand-written HTML5 — no engine, no framework, no dependencies. Every material, every figure and every note of the overture is generated by our own tools, so the whole thing is about 700 KB and the source ships raw and readable inside the download.

The overture is exactly sixty seconds long and the loop is one hundred and eighty, so it plays through three times. If you learn the tune you will stop needing the bar counter.

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More from Core Systems Asset Factory — free browser games and game-development asset packs at csaf.itch.io.