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My own project · online now
The Pembroke File
A mystery game you play in a browser tab, and the website that sells it.
There are two parts to this one, and they are described separately below.
Game
The game
Five drawers, five puzzles, one stolen diamond.
A thirty-four carat diamond left a museum during three minutes of darkness, and the investigator who worked the case disappeared. He left his files locked in a cabinet. You open the drawers one at a time and work out what happened.
what it does
- Every answer is somewhere in the papers you have already read. Nothing needs a guess or outside knowledge.
- The puzzles are things you handle rather than riddles. A lamp swings on its cable, a card tray jams, and one answer only appears when you shade a pencil over a blank notepad.
- One puzzle cannot be solved in fewer than seventeen moves. I had a program work that out before I released the game, so the number is checked rather than guessed.
- You can play the whole game using only a keyboard, and it remembers where you got to. A drawer you opened tonight is still open tomorrow.
- There is nothing to install and no account to make. The whole game is one file, so once the page has opened it keeps working even if your internet drops.
- 0
- Things to download, install or sign up for
- 130 KB
- The size of the whole game
- 5
- Drawers, each one a puzzle and a piece of the story
Website
The website
The page that has to make someone want to play it.
The game is free and takes a few minutes to start, so the website only has one job: show enough of the room to make you curious, and load fast enough that you do not leave first.
what it does
- The office moves as you scroll and dust drifts through the lamplight, so the page feels like the game before you have played it.
- All the artwork was cut down from 4.2 MB to 176 KB. It looks the same and opens far faster, which matters most on a phone.
- 176 KB
- The size of all the artwork, cut from 4.2 MB
- 0
- Steps between seeing the page and playing