DEADFALL

A Winter on the Kettle River Line — How to Play

DEADFALL is a parser game. You read what is in front of you and you type what you want to do. If you have never played one before, the whole skill is this: look at things, pick up what is loose, talk to whoever is standing there, and when the story tells you something is dangerous, believe it.

Getting Started

Press WALK THE LINE on the cover. You begin at the river landing below your own cabin, in January, having been away eleven days.

The screen has four parts. The middle column is the terminal, where the story is printed and your commands are echoed. The left panels show where you are, what you are carrying and which chapters of the investigation are open. The right panels hold the region chart and your journal. Along the bottom are buttons for the commands you use most, and the box where you type.

Your first three moves in any new room are always the same three, and they are always worth making:

> look > examine whatever the description named > search anything that could hold something

Controls

Type a command and press Enter, or click a button. Commands are not case-sensitive. Articles are ignored, so take the axe and take axe are the same command.

Getting around

Command	What it does
`NORTH` `SOUTH` `EAST` `WEST`	Walk that way. `N`, `S`, `E`, `W` work too.
`UP` `DOWN` `IN` `OUT`	Climb, descend, enter, leave.
`LOOK`	Describe the room again. Free.
`MAP`	Show the region chart of everywhere you have walked.

Handling things

Command	What it does
`EXAMINE thing`	Look closely. Most of the evidence in this story is found this way.
`TAKE thing` / `DROP thing`	Pick up or put down.
`SEARCH thing`	Go through a cache, a bunk, a tent, a press.
`READ thing`	Read a book, a tally, a day-book, a label.
`OPEN` / `CLOSE thing`	Open or shut it.
`USE thing`	Use the obvious thing in the obvious way.
`INVENTORY`	List what you are carrying. Free. `I` works.
`TALK name`	Speak to someone. Talk to them again; people say more the second and third time.

The eight verbs that belong to this story

These are on the STORY row of the buttons. They are the trade, and the game will not be finished without them.

Verb	What it means here
`SPRING`	Set off a deadfall from outside its fall, with a long pole. The single most important command in the game.
`CAST`	Put the dog out to work a line, a bank, or bad ice, and read what he finds.
`SCRAPE`	Take the top layer off something — a fresh stamp, a new mark — to see what is underneath.
`WIRE`	Send a telegram. Eleven words, and only when you have something worth eleven words.
`RIG`	Reeve off the block and tackle for a lift no one person can make.
`PRY`	Work a bar or a peavey under a weight and move it.
`HARNESS`	Put the dog and the toboggan together and haul.
`SHOUT`	Call out. Useful in exactly one place, and lethal in exactly one other.

Progress and help

Command	What it does
`SCORE`	Points so far, out of 150. Free.
`QUESTS`	Chapters of the investigation, open and closed. Free.
`JOURNAL`	What Wren has written down. Free, and the best record of the case.
`ACHIEVEMENTS`	The fourteen marks of a thorough run. Free.
`STATS`	Moves, rooms walked, conversations. Free.
`HINT`	Three rungs, gentle to explicit. Ask again for the next rung. Free, always available, never scored against you.

Turn Order

Each command you type is one turn, and a turn resolves in a fixed order. It is worth knowing, because the game always tells you things in this sequence:

Your command is echoed back to you.
The action happens, or the room is described.
Anything that follows from it is printed — what fell, who moved, what you have just realised.
Quest, journal, score and achievement notices, last.

So if you read a line about a log coming down and then a line about a chapter closing, they happened in that order. The notice is never the cause.

Free commands. LOOK, INVENTORY, SCORE, QUESTS, JOURNAL, ACHIEVEMENTS, STATS, MAP and HINT do not advance the clock. Look around as much as you like. WAIT costs a turn, and there are two moments in the story where spending it is the right thing to do.

Movement

The line runs roughly south to north: the river landing and your cabin at the bottom, the burn above it, the Company post at Bellhouse Landing off to the south-west, then the Upper River and finally the col under the divide.

Exits are named in the room description. If a way is shut, the game says why, and the reason is always something you can do something about — a gate you have not earned, gear you are not carrying, a dog you have not fed.

One way north. There is a point in the Upper River where the ice goes out behind you and the road south closes for the rest of the run. The story tells you plainly before it happens. Four objects worth five points each sit south of that line. Sweep the Landing before you go up. If you miss them the game is still completable and still winnable — you finish at 130 instead of 150 — but you cannot go back for them.

Scoring

Source	Points
Eight required chapters of the investigation, 15 each	120
The optional case against the factor	10
Four objects worth carrying out, 5 each	20
Maximum	150

Par is 94 moves. Points are never deducted, and asking for hints costs you nothing. A complete run is 150 points, all nine chapters, all fourteen achievements and all twenty places walked.

Winning

You win by getting Silas Crowe off the mountain and putting the case in Constable Pryor's hands at Warden Rock. There are two endings, and which one you get depends entirely on what you are carrying when you talk to him.

The partial ending. Enough to arrest the hired hand. The man who paid him keeps his coat and his post, and the constable tells you plainly why he cannot touch him.
The full ending. The cut die from the fur press, the tintype from the tent, and Ferris's statement about what he hauled. With those three, Pryor reaches past the hired hand to the factor.

Both are real endings and both are wins. The second one is the one worth going back for.

Losing

Three places in this story will kill you. All three are described before you can walk into them, all three have a hint ladder warning about them, and all three are the same mistake: getting under a weight that is held up by something you have not dealt with.

Walking the run under a bull-log that has not been sprung.
Crossing bad ice straight on instead of letting the dog find the way.
Making a loud noise under a loaded cornice.

The one rule that keeps you alive. Never touch a set trigger with anything shorter than the log it is holding up. Cut the sixteen-foot green spruce pole early, carry it the whole way, and SPRING anything you do not like the look of from outside its fall.

Death ends the run, but it never traps you: RESTORE puts you back where you saved. Nothing you can do will make the story unwinnable. There is no puzzle you can lock yourself out of, no object you can destroy that you needed, and no timer that runs out.

Saving and Restarting

Command	What it does
`SAVE`	Save to the default slot.
`SAVE name`	Save to a named slot, e.g. `save burn`.
`SAVES`	List the slots you have.
`RESTORE name`	Load a slot back.
`RESTART`	Begin the whole story again from the landing.

Saves live in your browser's local storage, under the key tronsoft_deadfall_save. They belong to that browser on that device. Clearing site data for the portal will delete them, and a save made in one browser will not appear in another.

Save before the col. Sensible slots for this story: one at the cabin when you first have the axe and the pole, one at the Landing before you go north, and one at the winter camp before the ice goes out.

If You Get Stuck

JOURNAL. Wren writes down every fact she has established. What is in there is usually what you should be acting on.
QUESTS. The open chapter names what you are trying to do.
HINT, three times. The third rung tells you the command.
Go back and TALK to people a second and third time. They say different things once you know more than you did.