The Ninety-Ninth Day
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1979. An Antarctic station, six people you have wintered with, and one of them is not one of them.
Halvorsen Station, Queen Maud Land: four huts, a mast, a generator, seven people, and eleven hundred kilometres of nothing in every direction including up. Ninety-nine days since the last flight out and forty-one until the next one.
You are Dr Karin Bly, physician and second-in-command, second winter. Five of the others went out to Site B on the ninety-first and came back on the ninety-fourth with forty-one sections of very deep ice and a good story. Nothing whatever is the matter.
The threat is a wrong conclusion
There is no monster in the corridor and almost nothing here can kill you. What can is being confident. Six people will answer any question you put to them, completely, and most of what they say is true, and every one of them is ashamed of something different — a burnt signal, an order they gave that they should not have, a shelf of animals they cannot account for.
The game keeps a case file rather than a journal. Every answer goes in as a claim, attributed and dated, and physical evidence goes in on exactly the same terms and is not privileged: a fuel log is an account of a night written by a person who filled in a column, and it can be wrong in all the ways a person can. When two accounts of the same thing cannot both be right, the file says so — and two of the five contradictions in this game have a completely innocent explanation, and the game will give it to you if you go and ask for it.
Six people, six jobs, and a timetable pinned on the back of the galley door. Where somebody is at ten past two matters. Where somebody is not matters more.
Three ampoules and six people
There is a test. It takes six hours, it consumes one of three glass ampoules made on a station bench out of one shelf of reagents, and there is no more of what was on that shelf. And the first of the three is not a choice, because nobody is going to roll a sleeve up for a doctor who has not.
That leaves two tests and four names, which is the whole shape of the game: the reagent cannot finish this, so the file has to.
Five acts, and one hand line
Act I — Winter Routine. Nobody is dead and nothing is wrong. Learn six people, six jobs, and where each of them is at which hour. Deliberately slow. You will need every detail of it.
Act II — The Core Shed. Four hundred and ten sections of forty-thousand-year-old ice are exactly where they should be. The one with the thing in it is not.
Act III — Sixty Below. A death, a blizzard, and a station that stops being one thing. Doors get shut for the first time in a hundred days, and the hand line between the huts stops being scenery.
Act IV — The Blood Room. Three ampoules. Six hours each. And something in the hut knows exactly how long six hours is.
Act V — The Accusation. Everybody at the table. You say a name, or you say none. Four endings, and the game will let you be wrong and will not pretend afterwards that you were not.
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.