The 4:52
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1938. One hundred and two minutes, over and over, and the only thing you get to keep is what you worked out last time.
Tuesday the twenty-seventh of September, 1938. Every newspaper on Paddington station says the same thing, which is that Mr Chamberlain has flown to Germany twice and may go a third time.
You are Alfred Teale, twenty-nine, commercial traveller in surgical rubber goods, of Acton, and you are standing on number four platform with a sample case in your right hand. The 3:10 to Plymouth — eleven coaches, an extra van, 4079 Pendennis Castle on the front — leaves in one minute. At 4:52 it leaves the rails in Larksdown Cutting.
You know that, and you have stopped trying to work out how you know it, because this is the twelfth time you have stood on this platform with this case in this hand.
One turn is one minute
The loop is a hard hundred and two minutes and it does not care what you are doing when it ends. Then it is ten past three again, your pockets are exactly as they were, your knuckles are not split, and nothing you did happened.
Except that you know it. Knowledge is the only object in this game that survives a reset: not what you are carrying, not what you have broken, not what anybody thinks of you, and not whether you are alive. Dying is not a failure state here — it is a way of being somewhere at a minute you could not otherwise have reached, and the game expects you to use it.
Eleven people, eleven coaches, and a timetable
Everything on this train happens at a particular minute in a particular place, every single time, identically. The guard is in his van until 4:28 and not after. A man in a brown suit says four words to his tea at 3:50. A boy of twelve is in the guard's van at 3:48 because he is twelve. And the key to the locked corridor door at the front of the train is in the right-hand pocket of a coat on the seat opposite yours from 3:46 to 4:20.
Being in the wrong coach costs you nothing except the whole afternoon, and you have a hundred and two minutes and as many afternoons as you can stand.
Preventing it is possible, and is not the answer
There is a communication chain over every window on this train and it works. Pulling it stops the train — in a cutting, on the Down main, with no protection out behind — and the 5:03 up from Plymouth comes round the curve at sixty-two miles an hour. Eleven becomes forty-one, and you did it by doing the obvious thing.
What actually causes the derailment is a buff card wired to a brass cock in the cab of an engine, a shed foreman at Old Oak Common with eleven engines to turn round on a wet Monday, and a low September sun sitting square behind a signal lamp. None of it is anybody's fault. All of it is written down somewhere on this train, and you can reach every piece of it if you are in the right place at the right minute.
Five acts
Act I — First Class. One loop, all the way round, to establish the reset and the notebook.
Act II — The Timetable. Where eleven people are, minute by minute. Eight facts and the act is over.
Act III — The Front of the Train. A locked corridor door, another man's coat, and eleven tons of loose coal at seventy miles an hour.
Act IV — The Cutting. Do the obvious thing, and then stay and watch what you have done.
Act V — 4:52. Three answers: get off at Westbury, sit still and be the only person who can tell an inquiry the truth, or the third one — which takes four separate pieces of a jigsaw and about ninety seconds of talking to a guard about a wooden horse.
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.