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About This Game

TO: Disposition clerk, Marrow Creek file
RE: Marrow Creek Correctional Institution, disturbance of July 2-4, 1994
For every name on the roster enter what became of him, who is responsible, and with what.

The riot is over, and the Records Division in New Bristol has assigned you the case. There are 84 names on the roster, 56 of them inmates and the rest officers and civilian staff. Everything the state collected sits on a records terminal, filed by number, and the first incident report in your inbox is IR-K2-01: the dining hall serving line, 17:40.

The index has not been digitized

The archive says so on its front page, and there is no keyword search either, so the Notepad is not optional. You open a record by typing its number into the Record no. box. IR-K2-01 is an incident report (IR) from the dining hall (K2) about roster number 01.



Plenty of numbers are printed inside other records and you can click straight through to them. Some records only get a mention, with no number attached. The first incident report asks for the kitchen's knife-board log to be pulled and says nothing about where it is filed. Finding it is your first job.



If you know two parts of a number and not the third, type ?? in its place and the archive lists the records that fit. Only one ?? per number, though. The case comes in eight files, and records from files you haven't reached are sealed until your entries open them.

Eight kinds of paper

Incident reports, statements, radio and phone transcripts, logs, medical reports, camera stills, letters, newspaper clippings. An officer's report reads like an officer wrote it ("Assault on Staff / Loss of Post"), and an autopsy gives the cause of death and leaves it there. To fill in who was responsible you go looking for a statement or a camera frame that puts someone in the room, or you set the autopsy beside a tower log and compare the times.

Some of the letters never made it out of the prison. They are still in the file with the mailroom censor's stamp on them and a couple of lines struck through.

Three at a time

The Report Form takes your entries in groups of three. If all three are right, they are confirmed together. If one is wrong, none of them are, and the form won't tell you which, so one guess can cost you two lines you had right.



Confirm enough lines and the next file comes in, usually from another part of the prison, until all eight are open.

On the machine

• About 130 records, and a People window with a card for every name on the roster. You can narrow it to inmates, guards, or staff, or to the people you haven't confirmed yet.
  
• A 1990s desktop: Inbox, Archive, People, Map, Notepad, and the Report Form, each in a window you can drag around.
  
• Camera stills pulled from the prison's tapes, in a sepia courtroom-sketch style.
  
• A Hint window that looks at what you have opened and answers in three steps. It never fills in a line for you.

Contains descriptions of violence and death in a prison setting.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Text-based accounts of killings, hostage-taking and injuries during a prison riot, including stabbings, strangulation and gunfire. Sepia still images of evidence show bodies and injured people, without graphic gore. No playable violence, no nudity, no sexual content.