Type Help

“Type Help” is an ambitious, enjoyable, and unique interactive mystery.

The player character reviews old audio recordings to piece together the details of a mass death that took place during a party inside an old house many decades ago. Each individual recording captures a moment in time at a specific location on the estate grounds while one or more guests are present. The player listens to conversations, or eavesdrops on the self-muttering of solo characters, in hopes of catching hints about other locations and times which might be of interest. The goal is to follow these breadcrumb trails of hints to track the comings and goings of every known guest through every scene. The task is difficult, time consuming, and often requires a degree of brute guesswork. I started playing the day before Halloween and finished a week later, seven to eight hours of playtime in total.

The mechanic, though unusual, is actually a great fit for the story which gradually unfolds. (Spoiler - click to show)Much like the 2001 film “Memento” about an amnesiac who solves a crime by recovering notes and Polaroid photos which take him back to memories of earlier events, effectively dramatizing his life out of sequence.

A player begins to get a sense of what is really going on long before all the gaps are filled in on the mystery time line, which is divided into four acts with more than twenty four scenes in total. The nomenclature to enter new location and time combinations is not trivial to type, and is unforgiving of typos. Though the mystery is compelling enough to want to complete just to get some closure, the mechanics do become tedious, and the story repetitive near the end. Still, when I did finally reach the ending (with frequent visits to the hint menu during that end game) “Type Help” delivered the sense of satisfaction and closure I had worked for.

This game led me to “The Roottrees are dead” (listed as an inspiration for this game). “Roottrees” has a similar mechanic, but I found it much easier to navigate.