The Scarlet Thread
A Victorian mystery in striking 1-bit ink, where the world's only colour is a single scarlet thread. Solve authentic Victorian parlour puzzles, uncover conflicting testimonies, and follow the red through a house where everyone has something to hide.
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11 itemsAbout the Game
"…the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life." — A. Conan Doyle
One thread of red in a world of ink.
Thornecliff Hall, on a fictional northern coast, in the age of gaslight. Thirty years ago a colonel carried home a relic he should never have touched: the Scarlet Skein, a braided thread of impossible red. For thirty years it has slept under cord, wax and lock. To-night, at the heir's coming of age, the casket is to be opened at last.
A fair-play mystery in the old tradition.
Told in the manner of the great Victorian sensation novels: narrator by narrator, document by document. Read the butler's honest journal, cross-check testimony, pin your suspicions to a deduction board and tie them together with red string — clue, after all, once meant a ball of thread.
Puzzles that belong to their century.
No bolted-on minigames. Every puzzle is a thing a Victorian parlour actually held, and every one exists in the story for a reason: verse riddles over dinner, the precedence of a seating plan, a tavern ring-puzzle guarding a dead man's casket, the winding and unwinding of the thread itself.
Features
One thread of red in a world of ink.
Thornecliff Hall, on a fictional northern coast, in the age of gaslight. Thirty years ago a colonel carried home a relic he should never have touched: the Scarlet Skein, a braided thread of impossible red. For thirty years it has slept under cord, wax and lock. To-night, at the heir's coming of age, the casket is to be opened at last.
A fair-play mystery in the old tradition.
Told in the manner of the great Victorian sensation novels: narrator by narrator, document by document. Read the butler's honest journal, cross-check testimony, pin your suspicions to a deduction board and tie them together with red string — clue, after all, once meant a ball of thread.
Puzzles that belong to their century.
No bolted-on minigames. Every puzzle is a thing a Victorian parlour actually held, and every one exists in the story for a reason: verse riddles over dinner, the precedence of a seating plan, a tavern ring-puzzle guarding a dead man's casket, the winding and unwinding of the thread itself.
Features
- 1-bit, one colour — a hand-tuned dithered world where red is reserved for the thread alone
- True period puzzles — riddles, seating precedence, a real baguenaudier ring-lock, rituals of knot and cord
- The Collins structure — multiple narrators, re-readable evidence, a red-string deduction board
- Three endings — mercy, law, and the sea
- Play the sin first — the prologue puts the colonel's trespass, thirty years past, in your own hands
