Red String Over the Atlantic

April 1927. Somewhere over the North Atlantic, aboard the rigid airship LZ-114 Weltmeer, thirty-eight hours out of Friedrichshafen and not yet halfway to Lakehurst.

A passenger is dead in Cabin 12. The ship cannot turn around.

You have until landfall to name who did it — and prove it.

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You do not pick a culprit from a list

You build the accusation physically, on a corkboard in your cabin, out of the ship's own paper.

Gather. Walk the ship — the promenade with its forty feet of slanted glass, the dining salon's walnut marquetry, the wireless room and its spool of flimsies, the keel corridor running away into the dark under the gasbags. Look at things. Sit down with people. Everything you take becomes a card: a photograph, a typed statement, a wireless flimsy, a torn ticket stub, a page of the manifest.

Pin. Go back to Cabin 7, to the board. Take two cards and pin them together with red string.

A string only holds if the two genuinely contradict each other. The steward's account of where he stood, against the timestamp on a telegram he could not have sent from there. A ticket stub against the passenger manifest. Same person, same question, two different answers — that is a contradiction, and the string goes taut and scarlet. Anything else hangs slack and dead, and the board tells you in plain English why.

Close the loop. The game checks the chain, not the name. Every link has to hold, and the last one has to close a loop that passes through exactly one piece of paper naming a person. That person is your accusation.

The crossing is the clock. Four legs — Lake Constance, the Scillies, mid-Atlantic, landfall — and each buys you a handful of hours and no more. Walking the ship costs nothing. Looking and asking cost the hour. Every leg opens new evidence and spoils some of what you already hold; a string pinned to stale paper will not hold.

At Lakehurst you name him. A verified chain through the right person is a conviction. The right name behind a proof that does not hold is a man walking free down the mooring mast, and the game will tell you exactly which link let him go.

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Controls

Everything is pointer-driven — there is no walking and no camera to fight.

Move	Open the annotated deck plan and click a room. Free.
Examine	Click a glowing hotspot in the room. Costs one hour.
Interview	Click a passenger's plate, then Press the Point to work through the sitting. Costs one hour; the whole conversation is included.
The board	The Board tab on the right of the room. Click two cards to attempt a string.
Undo	Cut Last String takes the most recent one off the board.
Accuse	Name Him, when you think the loop closes.

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The passengers

Alastair Kettering — marine underwriter, London. Cabin 12. Dead.

• Ernst Hallam, chief steward
• Mrs. Iris Vaudrey, widow, travelling with a hatbox she keeps locked
• Dr. Felix Soltau, ship's surgeon
• Colette Perrin, wireless operator
• Kapitän Wilhelm Reuter, master of the Weltmeer
• Jonah MacKaye, photographer, on a press ticket
• Anneliese Dressler, Kettering's secretary

One of them did it. All of them are lying about something, and only some of the lies are about the murder.

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What is worth seeing

• The corkboard. Real cork, brass pins, silver-gelatin prints with white borders, typed onionskin with the struck-over letters still on it, and actual red string drawn with sag between the pins. It is the whole game and it looks like something somebody made.
• The opening. The Weltmeer on her flank above nine hundred feet of cloud, with the titles landing on the hull.
• The keel corridor. Duralumin ring frames running away into the dark, and the sea noise coming up through them.
• The paper. Twenty-seven pieces of evidence, each drawn as its own object — the wireless station's stamp and the operator's initials, the hand-annotated deck plan, the manifest page, the ash tray beside the bunk.

Brass, walnut marquetry and etched glass. Cloud light moving across the promenade floor as the ship rolls. Warm cabin lamps against a cold grey ocean.