Rain Check-in

Easy self check-in, they said. Turned out to be more of an escape room experience.

This summer my partner and I rented a room with self check-in for one night. The instructions to get in were wild: we had to find a key taped behind a railing outside the building, guess the right staircase in a secondary building in the yard, and then retrieve the home key from a wall safe hidden behind an umbrella stand. This experience convinced me to write a game about self check-in. It’s inspired by several check-ins I’ve had since 2018 up to nowadays, even if the story is completely fictional.

Features:

This parser-based interactive fiction uses standard commands (you can find a list in the HELP menu). If you get stuck, there’s an integrated hints menu, or you can read the walkthrough. The walkthrough also includes six artworks and a guide to all the footnotes. The game has multiple endings: two game overs, one main ending, an alternative path to the main ending, and one side ending.

AI:

As you may know, English isn’t my native language, and in my previous works that was sometimes a drawback. For this project I focused on a smaller location and used ChatGPT as a writing assistant. I ran almost every sentence through it several times to correct grammar, smooth out phrasing, and find the most context-appropriate terms. It often suggested multiple options, and that really helped me tell my story the way I meant it, even in a language I’m not yet fluent in.

That’s it! I hope you enjoy playing this game and, to quote ChatGPT punning me: ‘Break a lock—uh, leg!’ ⛈️

Zeno August 2025.