FLINCH.EXE

A magical girl holds up a camcorder and shows you around.

The hallway is dark, so you walk it yourself. A door opens. Something in the room is making a noise, and you have to put the flashlight on it before she'll let you choose anything. It's a puppy. It was always going to be a puppy.

Eight unmarked tapes. You can only take the next one off the table once you've finished the one before it.

What it is actually doing

It isn't counting what you picked. It's counting how long you stood there before you picked it — how long you waited in the hallway, how many times you walked up to the wrong door and turned back, how often you got the light close to the thing and then pulled it away.

At the end it tells you. All of it, in seconds, in front of things that turned out to be a puppy, a cat, a rubber duck.

You stood still in the corridor for 41.6s. You turned the light away 7 times. You froze longest in front of a rubber duck.

And then it plays again

Leave it alone and the tape restarts. Each one you finish sits a little deeper, and the deeper it goes the worse the tape gets — the letters come apart, the pictures lose their edges, the cheerful little tune drifts out of key until it's just noise. She remembers where you stopped last time. She'll mention it.

Controls

Mouse, keyboard, or a controller — all three do everything.

• W A S D walk · mouse look (click to lock it) · Enter open
• mouse sweep the flashlight · hold it on something for half a second
• ← → choose · Enter confirm

Headphones help. Every sound in this is synthesised at runtime — there isn't a single audio file in the build.

Comfort

Flickering images and sudden sound. There's a warning on the first launch. Nothing jumps out at you and screams. That's the whole joke.

Korean and English, switchable with the CC button at any time.