The Long Descent
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1958. Eleven miles down, in a machine that is failing.
Since 1956 something eleven miles under Lapland has been making a noise: one pulse every four seconds, unvarying, through Christmases and equipment changes and an earthquake in Turkey that shows on the trace as a scribble the signal simply carries on underneath.
The Institute has built one thermal borer and hired one thermal engineer. You are Vera Lindqvist, the machine is called Grendel, and the first thing you are told at the pit head is that nobody has ever been down there before. That is the first thing you are told.
The condition bar is not yours
This is a game about maintaining a vehicle you are sitting inside. Heat comes out of the rock at a rate that depends on how deep you are; the cooling plant takes it away at a rate that depends on how much of the plant is still turning. Those two numbers are on a brass plate in the engine room — capacity thirteen, less six if the pump goes, less four for the radiator bank, less three for the primary line — and every puzzle in the game is a rearrangement of them.
The parts do not simply exist. The only impeller in eleven miles is inside the hoist you need for lifting, and cutting it out ruins the hoist permanently. One gasket set fits the pump or the primary line, and there is one of it. At the pit head the hold takes six units of cargo and the stores shed has fourteen, and what you leave on the gantry is a decision you will meet again at seven miles, in the dark, at a hundred and ninety-seven degrees.
Five acts, going down
Act I — The Pit Head. Surface, and nothing is hot. Choose your six units and seal the hull. Everything you leave behind is still a problem.
Act II — The Salt. Two miles. Inside the hull the plant wins comfortably; outside it does not, and everything you need is outside. Also: a squared oak survey stake, driven into salt two miles down, cut with a date thirty-five years before your machine was drawn.
Act III — The Fossil Sea. A cavern with an ocean in it, a shore, a tide line and shells. She floats, and a floating machine gets no traction, so four units go over the side and you choose which.
Act IV — The Machine Graveyard. Your pump seizes at thirty-seven thousand feet, in a chamber with five other borers in it — 1899, 1923, 1938, 1944, 1951 — and every one of them was told it was the first.
Act V — The Chamber. Eleven miles. She is not going back up; she never was. What goes back up is a capsule rated for one payload, and there are three things it could carry, and one of them is you.
Roughly two 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.