The Fire Curtain
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1888. Nine hundred people, and a fire that obeys rules you can read.
The Marlborough Theatre on the Blackfriars Road seats nine hundred and eleven, and on the fourteenth of November 1888 it holds about nine hundred, which is a Wednesday, a pantomime in its fourth week, and the best house of the run.
You are Walter Neame, thirty-nine, resident fireman — a post the Lord Chamberlain's office requires every licensed house to keep, and which most of them treat as a man in a uniform standing in the wings. You have treated it as something else for four years, and there is a card pinned inside your box with four rules on it in your own handwriting, because the man before you did not leave any and you had to work them out in a real fire at another theatre with nothing to go on.
The rules
Fire passes only through an open door. Only into a place with something to burn. It goes with the draught before it goes any other way. And a place with nothing left in it goes out.
Those four are the whole of the model and they never change. Which means this is not a game about running — it is a game about steering. You shut a door to starve it. You open one to pull it somewhere it can do less harm. You knock a lever and eleven tons of iron comes down across the proscenium arch in nine seconds and the stage and the house become two separate buildings, and it cannot be raised again from the stage side, and there are two hundred people on that side.
The draught in this house runs in at the propped stage door, across the stage, up the flies and out at the lantern in the roof, because the lantern is open. Shut the lantern and it runs the other way: over the footlights, into the house, where the public are. That is rule three, and it is printed on the card, and the game will let you do it.
The people obey rules too
They go out the way they came in. Not the nearest way — the way they came in. That is not a rule this game invented, and it is the reason the third act is the hard one.
Six hundred are in the house and both its doors go to the same foyer, whose six leaves open inward and are on their catches. Three hundred more are in the gallery, at the top of a stone stair three feet wide, behind a door that is locked at the foot — locked every night for four years, to stop the sixpenny gallery coming down into the shilling pit at the interval. There is no law against it. There will not be one until 1890.
There is one key. It is in the manager's waistcoat pocket, and he is in the foyer telling people to go steady, which is the correct thing to be doing and is not the thing you need him to be doing.
How it ends
Four weeks later, in a coroner's court, a fair man asks you one question that is not in your deposition, and the room goes quiet, because everyone has been waiting six days for somebody to be asked it. Four things are true and you can say any of them under oath.
Two and a half to three hours. No sign-up, no download, and it saves where it stands.
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.