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Last Light
Ferrier Station burns on the night of the 22nd of March. Seven of you get out, with the one snow tractor, which has a cracked block, the emergency sledge, twenty-eight litres of paraffin and no radio. The old station is eighty-four miles north across the shelf. It was abandoned in 1974, nobody ever went back to clear it, and it has walls.
The sun sets for the winter in fourteen days. Today it is up for six hours and forty minutes. Tomorrow it will be up for less.
What it is
Last Light is a turn based survival game built like the old trail games: a party with names, a route in legs, food and fuel that run down, and things that happen on the road. Each turn is a day, and nothing moves while you read.
In the morning you decide how to spend the daylight. In the evening you decide how many lamps to burn and who keeps watch, and then the night happens. The number at the top of the screen is how much daylight there is today. It goes down every day and there is nothing you can do about it.
The tractor will not last. Once it goes, the daylight left is not enough to walk the miles left, and you will work that out for yourself from the figures. Sooner or later you will go out into the dark with a lamp because the sums leave nothing else, and by then you will have read the log from 1974 and seen the boots in the hut, so you will know what the dark is for.
Nobody ever names it or sees it. It only comes where there is no light. It takes one person a night and leaves the boots. You can go out with a lamp and look for it. You can leave somebody behind and buy a quiet night with them. The six will remember which you did.
There are two ways round the middle of the shelf, and you choose at the last flag. Nobody will tell you a number for what the party thinks of you. They will show you.
What do you do?
Early build. Fourteen days, two routes, four endings, about an hour a run. Progress is saved in your browser.