The Long Dry
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1886, Arizona Territory. Three people want the same thing for three reasons and the three reasons do not fit together.
You are Jack Ottaway, forty-four, shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo out of Tucson, eleven years on the run. On the eleventh of July four men took the Copper Queen payroll out of the Dry Wash, killed Tom Bree on the box beside you, and did not kill you, and everybody in Bisbee has worked out an opinion about that.
It is the eighteenth. It is a hundred and four in the shade, it has not rained since April, two hundred and eleven men have not been paid since June, and there is a girl of fourteen asleep on four flour sacks in Mrs Vogt's wash house who should be at her aunt's in Benson.
There is no neutral act
Three factions, and every one of them wants something reasonable. The Company has to file either a robbery or a defalcation with Cincinnati by the thirtieth. The town is four thousand dollars of other people's eating carried in one woman's ledger since the second of July. Cayetano was a sergeant of Indian Scouts, has twelve discharge papers in an oilcloth wallet that say Character: excellent, and there is a train at Bowie on the fourteenth with his name on a list.
Standing with any one of them costs you the other two, out loud, in public, on a running total you
can read at any time with reckon. Anything you say to one of these three people is in the
other two camps by supper. That is not treachery — that is a town of five thousand.
Three ways into the mine, and you get one
The payroll never left the property. Getting onto the four hundred level takes a door, and there are three, and all three are fully built. The Company has a hoist and a brass tag. The town has eleven men who worked this hill and know the old No. 3 adit. Cayetano has been through the water tunnel from Cottonwood Spring twice, because in '83 he was paid four dollars a month to know things like that.
Forty opens a door. You are not going to be at forty with more than one of them.
Cassie Bree is not a mechanic
She is fourteen, she is in her father's coat with the cuffs turned up four times, and she carries a Winchester that is too long for her, correctly, because somebody taught her and it was not you.
She has opinions. She refuses orders she thinks are wrong. She is the only person alive who saw a face. And in the Dry Wash there are forty swallows of water and two days and two people, and nobody dies of that — it is not a survival mechanic — but she is keeping count of how you split it, and so are you, and at the end of the crossing there is a number.
She can be killed by a decision you made for a reason. Two separate people warn you what she is, in the first act, to your face.
Five acts
Act I — Bisbee. Three people who can open a door, and a girl in a wash house. Nothing here is a puzzle. It is the moment before you find out you cannot do all three.
Act II — The Dry Wash. Forty miles, two canteens, and the crossing where it happened — and four hundred yards of rock shelf that eleven men did not walk on the twelfth.
Act III — The Mine. Four hundred feet down, and the boards across a worked-out stope are the colour of a floorboard when everything else down there is the colour of a nail.
Act IV — The Rancheria. A day north into the Mule Mountains, and a door that was open on the eighteenth and may not be on the twenty-first, and does not reopen.
Act V — The Long Dry. Four thousand two hundred and eleven dollars and four endings, and the game does not think one of them is right.
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.