The Turning Light
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1907. A rock lighthouse, and one keeper left to work it.
Corrach Rock is eleven miles west of Ardnabuie and is not an island. It is a hundred and forty feet of gneiss that the Atlantic covers twice a day except for the top forty, and on the top forty the Commissioners put a hundred and six feet of dressed granite in 1863.
You are Duncan Tait, assistant keeper, and you are nine days late because of the weather. The light has not been seen from the shore for two nights. When the relief boat puts you on the east landing and leaves — and it does leave, immediately, because the glass is falling — you find the entrance door standing open, a tower that is making no noise at all, the Principal Keeper dead at the foot of the oil store ladder, and the station boat gone from the west davits with its falls lowered and coiled by somebody who was not in a hurry.
There is nobody else on the rock. There will be nobody else for three days.
The weight
The lens is turned by clockwork, and the clockwork is driven by a weight that falls a hundred feet down a tube in the wall. It has to be wound back to the top every twenty minutes, and the winding handle is in the lantern room, and everything else in this game is somewhere else.
So this is not a game with a countdown in it. It is a game with a leash. The pump is at the bottom of the tower; the oil is at the bottom of the tower; the coal, the tools, the range that is the only warm thing on the rock — all at the bottom of the tower. Every one of them is a round trip, and you plan every round trip against the same question: can I be back at the top before the weight is on its buffer?
Because a lamp that burns without turning is not a dim Corrach. It is a fixed white light, and to anybody out there with eyes, a fixed white light where a flashing one should be is not this lighthouse at all. It is some other lighthouse, somewhere else. That distinction is the whole game, and five weeks ago it killed nine people.
What the acts do
Act I cannot kill you, and it teaches the rule by letting you break it once, safely, with nobody out there. Act II puts the sea inside the tower through a door nobody shut, and the hand pump that empties it only pumps while a man is standing at it. Act III turns the rule inside out: the only way to stop the light failing for good is to stop it on purpose, for seventeen minutes, at a time you choose — and the game notices whether you wrote that in the log before you did it or after. Act IV is ice on the outside of the lantern glazing at four below, and the glass is cleared from the outside because there is no other side to clear it from. Act V is a boat coming, and one entry left to write.
How it ends
Four ways, and none of them is the right one. What happened at this station is knowable and you can know all of it — a rope that wore out because nobody turned it end for end, a man who could not see it and would not say so, and a second man who wrote it down properly and then cut the pages out because the first man asked him to. What you do with that is a document, in ink, that will be read out at an inquiry in February by somebody who was not here.
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.