"Please Help Me" - A 4 room/puzzle game ["horror"]

Inspired by the announcement of Ectocomp (though this is too early and took me too long to make) I made a little game for the Halloween Holiday.

Maybe I’ll actually try my hand with the contest and the time limit next month, though, I admit, I am a slow writer when it comes to Inform so 3 hours is really tight for me.

Here’s my little “creepy” IF for Halloween. Made it over the course of about 9 hours with interruptions from nephews, the DSL guy, dinner, etc.

“Please Help Me” howtophil.com/IF/pleasehelpme/

Obviously, being coded in one day, there are bound to be bugs, missing features, typos, and possibly unintentional traps. Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think.

Hope you enjoy. Either way, thanks for taking the time to read this and possibly the time to try out my game :slight_smile:

Invisiclues:

Room 1

There’s a dead rat in the room

There’s a scalpel

Get the scalpel

Cut the rat

Room 2

Have you tried searching things

There’s not much in this room

There are doors, walls, floors…

Search the floor

Searching the wall will put you under a “time crunch”

Room 3

The shelves really are empty

Look at the table

The chair might be a nice place to rest

Sometimes things look different when you’re sitting down

Look at the table while sitting in the chair

Room 4

If you guess the wrong code too many times, the fun heats up

You already got the clue and solution for this one

Think back

The person in trouble doesn’t have the code

You have the code

It’s the number scratched on your black box mentioned at the start

It’s 1979

My nephew and his friend caught a couple bugs for me in the last room. I have squashed them… the bugs, not the nephew and his friend.

howtophil-

I tried out the game–it’s a fun little puzzler! I had to use the invisiclues on each of the last three rooms, but the solutions were reasonable and made sense. Thanks for sharing!

Glad you had fun :slight_smile:

This was partially to see what I could do in “one day” as a sort of longer-time-limited dry run to get me primed for Ectocomp and similar. I hope the puzzles can be figured out without the clues, and had originally fallen under the standard author’s mistake of thinking “these would be easy for me” but also “I wrote them” so :wink:

Trying to find that sweet spot between being too obvious and being completely inscrutable.

Nice and short. I’ve attached a transcript of my playthrough I you can use it.

I had to resort to hints for room 3. While the perspective shift may be necessary, it seems a thorough search would have the same effect eventually, though I see why the story wants the former to be the case.
Ed: Put the potential spoiler into spoiler tags.
please help me transcript.txt (15 KB)

Thanks for playing and for the transcript. :slight_smile: I’ll take that and see about sprucing up the game to deal with some of the things you tried.

The thing with the perspective change was sort of my way of pointing out through a game that some things can only be seen when you’re in a certain place. Also, there have been so many lost things I have searched for for hours, only to plop in my chair and see it had slipped under my monitor, in just the right place I’d never see otherwise.

Thanks to some transcripts from a couple players, I have rooted out a few more bugs and improved responses for things they tried (and that you might try).