Ashgrove
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1898. A house in the West Riding with fourteen rooms on the plan and, on some nights, fifteen.
You are Miss Charlotte Sowerby, thirty-one, schoolmistress, of Hunslet in Leeds, and until the third of this month you had met your uncle Roger exactly twice. He is dead, and he has left you Ashgrove: fourteen rooms, eleven acres, a housekeeper of thirty-one years' standing, a lurcher, and an income that covers about two thirds of what the roof wants.
You are staying three nights.
The prose is not to be trusted
This is the one game in the collection where the thing that lies to you is the interface. Above a certain amount of fright, Ashgrove will rewrite a room's description, list a way out that is not there, leave out one that is, and — when your nerve has gone entirely — give you a different name for a room you have been standing in all week.
Nerve is not health. It cannot kill you, it is not a countdown, and it goes back up: steady
costs a turn and buys you back the ability to believe your own eyes. What it changes is the sentences.
Four things never lie, and the game says so in writing
A game that lies has to be extremely honest about when, so in Act III it prints the rules and does not print them again:
- Movement never lies. If there is a door west,
wgoes through it, listed or not. If there is not, you walk into plaster and lose a little more of your nerve. Nothing in this house is ever out of reach because of what you are feeling. - The candle never lies.
test north— air moves through openings, and a flame leans or it does not, and it has no opinion whatever about how frightened you are. - Chalk never lies.
chalk herenumbers a room;chalk northputs a cross on a wall. What you write on a floor is shown back to you in its own line under any description the house cares to invent. - The dog never lies. Tibb is nine, he has lived here all of it, and there are four rooms in this house he will not enter. He has been right about all four.
And pace gives you the room in feet, honestly, every time. Two rooms of a size are one
room. That is how you find out what is wrong with this house, and it is a subtraction, and arithmetic
is not a mood.
Draw a map on paper
That is not a figure of speech and it is not nostalgia. In the cellars in Act IV the ways-out line is worth nothing at all, and a stick of chalk, a candle held to a wall, a pair of feet and a dog are the whole of your equipment — which is exactly what the first three acts spend their time putting in your hands.
Five acts
Act I — The Reading of the Will. Fourteen rooms and every one of them honest. Nothing lies, your nerve cannot drop, and the whole point is to learn what this house looks like when it is telling the truth.
Act II — The Fifteenth Room. Daylight, a plan of 1841, a stick of chalk and a pair of feet. Pace the first floor and take one number from the other.
Act III — The Nursery Stair. After the lamps are lit. The house starts lying, and tells you the rules first.
Act IV — The Cellars. The interface at its least use, and the one place in Ashgrove where you can be killed — which is not the house, and is a hole somebody took the boards off in 1863 and never put back.
Act V — Ashgrove. What the house is doing and who it is doing it for. Neither answer is supernatural and both are worse, and there are three things a woman of thirty-one can do about thirty-four years.
Roughly two to three hours. Autosaves every turn, checkpoints at every act.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.