Read the file

The only verb is read.

A file arrives from the Kii coast of Japan, August 1997. Five men have come ashore on the same beach in five Augusts. The newspaper counted the fifth one and never printed his name. His sister did, in the first paragraph of her letter — and she is the one who sent you the file.

Nothing here is a lock to be picked. Everything here is a sentence somebody wrote down for another reason.

What you do

• Read what is on the desk — a post-mortem, an evacuation register, a tide table, a works leave book, four newspaper cuttings, and the statements of people who will only say so much.
• Cut the line that matters and pin it to the corkboard. The paper keeps the hole where it was.
• Run a string between two clippings when you believe they belong to the same argument.
• Ring people. Ask the question you have earned the right to ask, and take down what they say.
• Name him — and then answer the one question in the file that has no right answer.

The board never tells you that you are right. It shows you only what you have actually joined together, which is not the same thing, and is the whole of the game.

The case

A village thanks a man it will not name. A retired fisherman has carried four bodies up that sand and told four officers why. One of them wrote it down, and nothing was ever done with it.

The fifth man was a typesetter who came home for four days every August, who had never learned to swim, and who walked out of a shelter at 23:31 into a typhoon without giving the clerk a reason.

The Hero is one complete case. It runs in your browser, there is nothing to install, and it is free. 

This is the first case. Follow the page if you want to know when the next one lands. It's been a dream of mine for a while to work on a game and i'd love some feedback on making this fun for everyone and maybe turning it into something more than a passion project.