The Incident at Galley House

The core twist of Type Help and Incident is the thunderclap.

When someone dies by thunderclap, almost everyone completely forgets that the dead person ever existed. Everyone's minds fill in the gaps with plausible details (as plausible as possible), and they tend to avoid thinking too hard about the gaps that are really inexplicable.

But, inevitably, someone will remember the person who most recently died, and then their memories all come flooding back (including remembering that they didn't remember the person briefly, which is usually pretty upsetting in its own right). Whoever remembers the previously dead person will die by thunderclap a few minutes later, making a "chain" of people.

(It's never revealed in the story why the thunderclaps happen, or how they work; the characters call it a "curse." It certainly seems supernatural.)

The curse makes it difficult for characters inside the story to reason out what's happening, and, in the structure of the game, it makes it more difficult for the player to logic out what happened. The player naturally assumes that if John knows something at 06, he will continue to know it at time 07; if he says that he doesn't know something, the player assumes that John must be lying to cover up a secret.

In Type Help, this ties back to the frame story of @, the previous owner of the laptop that you're exploring. @ is lonely. @ has no friends, no family, nobody who cares about him, and in 00-final-note, @ has come to realize what has happened to him and why. Someone (a commanding officer, perhaps) must have assigned @ the job precisely because @ has no one in the world who cares about him.

@'s loneliness manifests in @ behaving in all sorts of weird and creepy ways. He puts all sorts of weird personal emotional stuff in his commentary, because he has no one to talk to, no one to tell it to except these notes.

The most glaringly creepy is the hangman game with no "correct" letters, inevitably ending in an ASCII drawing of a hanged man, with the message, "You did your job. The world is safer now."

But surely the creepiest of all is the hidden file 00-dream, which you can only find by guessing the file based on his mentioning "the dead bodies strewn about like in that terrifying dream I mentioned" in 21-CH-3.

00-dream does not describe dead bodies strewn about; it simply includes the lyrics of Because of You by Lee Sims, and its player piano code "43092". You can use that to find the YouTube version of the player-piano playing the song, a cheerful, upbeat tune.

Self-playing "player pianos" are inherently creepy in their own right. The keys are moving as if the piano is being played by a ghost. They're often not tuned perfectly, creating an eerie dissonance in their performance. Secret player pianos figure regularly in parlor-room murder mysteries, where the characters wrongly assume that if the piano was playing, someone must have been playing it, when, in fact, the piano was playing itself.

And there's something kinda sad and lonely about player pianos. You're listening to a machine mechanically perform a piano piece, instead of making a real connection to the performer and their performance.

Furthermore, @ has hidden a secret in 00-dream: he's italicized some of the letters. If you transcribe them, they spell out iaMricHaRDloNglEY. Once you realize, as the player, what you're doing, you've realized that you've doomed yourself. Now you remember Richard Longley. Now you are the next person to die in the chain, and perhaps countless others will die after you because of it. You could have stopped once you'd spelled out iamrichar, but you just couldn't help yourself, could you? You just had to know, and now look what you've done?!

In Incident, you start at the front door of Galley House; the door is locked. You read the newspaper, and the door is unlocked. Inside, there's a note on the machine, and then there isn't, and then there's a new note. Whenever you look away from the machine (to crank the generator), something has changed.

As it unfolds, you discover that your character, Reya, arrived at Galley House with a bunch of people. The door didn't unlock itself. The other people unlocked it. But then they got thunderclapped, one by one, and so the game plays out from the thunderclapped perspective, notes magically appearing on the machine that were, in fact, directly handed to you by people you can no longer remember.

A nifty premise! But… there's something implausible about it, especially the scan of the "Prototype Machine" in the evidence. When you first look at that scan, there's no one in that photo at all. Then, when you discover scenes involving Sam Moors, he starts appearing in the photo, when he wasn't there before.

Then, later, when you discover Ervin Dolsky, he doesn't just appear in the photo; he also suddenly starts appearing in the machine. Scenes where he didn't appear, suddenly he does appear. This leads you to discover that he's intentionally chaining people together to try to clean up all the loose ends, ending with himself.

This makes no sense; that's not how the curse works. The thunderclap doesn't force people ignore physical evidence of the person's existence. Martha saw photos of her husband, and saw him in those photos. (If it forced people to ignore physical evidence, they'd presumably have to ignore the handed-off notes themselves.)

After discovering (and presumably remembering) Ervin, Reya doesn't then die. Reya sets the house on fire, permanently ending the chain. The Incident at Galley House has a melancholy but hopeful ending. Perhaps now, the entire chain has truly been put to rest.

Ervin Dolsky is sort of a creepy loner, but he's not alone; he's a a murderer who has several friends and colleagues, and he kills them one by one to save the world. He gives a tragic but villainous suicidal monologue in his final scene.

The theme of Richard's true loneliness, of the ineffectual creepiness that his loneliness inspires in him, is completely gone. Ervin accomplishes all of his goals. Richard accomplished nothing, not even saving the world, because we went digging through his laptop.

Playing Type Help feels like being Richard Longley. Playing Incident doesn't feel like being Reya.

Creepy horror stories end with a surprising but inevitable twist that the horror is still out there. Type Help does that; Incident doesn't.