An Evening to Die For

Photosensitivity warning: the opening sequence, with its storm and lightning, flashes the whole screen between black and white. If you are sensitive to flashing lights, look away until the text "It is a dark and stormy night." has passed.

About the game

It is a dark and stormy night, the dinner is over, and the master of the house is lying face down in his own blood. Eight guests are scattered around the mansion, every one of them with a title, an opinion and an alibi, and you are the detective who happens to be there.

You walk from room to room, from the library and the conservatory to the kitchen and the pantry, examining the furniture and the odd objects lying around, and asking each guest where they were all evening. Somewhere in the house is the weapon, and somewhere among the guests is the person who used it. Every case is shuffled at the start: the body, the weapon, the killer and even a hidden passage change from one game to the next.

Time matters. Every room you enter, every guest you question and every object you pick over makes the killer a little more nervous, and the game ranks your detective work by how quickly you crack it. Dawdle too long and you may become the next victim.

Playing it here

An Evening to Die For is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a simple virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it. This one targets XO-CHIP, a modern extension with more memory, a second drawing colour and better sound, and was made for Octojam 6, a yearly CHIP-8 game jam. It runs here in the Octo emulator, with the speed and colours chosen for it in the archive.

Click Play and press Space to leave the title screen, then keep pressing Space to read through the introduction. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too: the D-pad moves and A confirms.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Find your spyglass first. It is lying somewhere in the house. Until you have it, you cannot tell a murder weapon from an ordinary vase or fire poker; with it, the bloodstained one gives itself away.

Alibis cross-check. Guests tell you where they were and who they were with. Someone whose story nobody else backs up deserves a closer look.

Accuse at the body. Once you are carrying the weapon, go back to the room where the host was found and gather everyone there. Pick the wrong person, or make your case without the weapon, and the killer walks free.

Credits and licence

An Evening to Die For was created by John Earnest, who also wrote Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator used to run it here (MIT licence). He placed the game in the public domain under CC0 1.0 through the Chip8 Community Archive. The licence text is linked from this page.