Type Help (2025)

At base level it's an interactive creepypasta, the supernatural premise more a loose connection of themes and spookifications than something that really makes sense. But the execution following from that, both narratively and mechanically, is superb.

Few games claiming to have the player solving mysteries actually feel like you're solving a mystery, but there were multiple times in Type Help when I had to think about the characters, about the layout of the house, about information from other scenes, and put it all together to figure out what file to request. An example: in 05-LI-3-9, Oswald says something about being the end of his line and wishing he'd had kids. It's toward the end of the scene, though it's not the last line he says, but he doesn't say where he's going next. However, I remembered from a later scene, 08-MA-3-5, that Tony's room used to be the nursery. Might Oswald, feeling nostalgic for the children he never had, wander in to the nursery, unaware it's now someone's bedroom? And since I hadn't yet placed Tony in the 6th period, I requested 06-TO-3-4, and lo and behold, there it was. And at other times I brute-forced it by knowing the location and participants in a scene and simply trying every possible time until I found it. Sometimes I just guessed and got lucky. It's mixture of skill, instinct, inference, and luck akin to how feel when I'm working on programming project and I mostly know what I'm doing, which is my favorite kind. And there was one moment that had me yelling, out loud, "YES! FUCK YOU!" At a game whose primary form of interaction is typing file names.

Narratively, I love how it feels stilted and confusing until you finally realize what's happening, at which point you return to previous scenes and suddenly see the tragedy underneath seemingly innocuous comments. As you discover more, the ways in which people reshape their memories to fit the newly warped reality get increasingly sad and disquieting. Where the premise is vague, the actual consequences are concrete and disturbing.

Nice to end the year on a reminder of how innovative, evocative, and surprising games can be, and to reinforce my belief that browser games are sorely overlooked by games criticism and "serious gamers" (though, credit where it's due, I only heard about this because The A.V. Club put it in their Top 25 of the year.)

p.s. I think maybe the coolest part about this game is that, because "winning" is really more about uncovering all of the story and understanding all of the intricacies, you could give a new player any random scene that they otherwise likely wouldn't find until hours in, and I don't think it would break the game or even really be a "spoiler" in a meaningful sense.

p.p.s. At the start of the game I was convinced that @ was Alan Thomas (who signs his messages AT, I mean come on) and that the whole thing had something to do with time travel. While I am pleased that I was completely wrong about the 2nd bit and it was way less predictable than that, I am still annoyed that I was wrong about the 1st bit. It's right there!

Had a lovely time with this one! It's a database-trawler murder mystery in the vein of Her Story or Return of the Obra Dinn, except entirely text-based and navigated with a cute command line interface. Spooky happenings and clever deduction puzzles abound, and I particularly dug how the story allows for tons of wild speculation without ever straining credulity. The repetitive puzzle format wore a bit thin before the end, but the big reveal was so fun that I didn't really mind.

All in all, an instant freeware classic.

Earlier this week I was lamenting to @tylerisrandom that I no longer like new games and keep falling back to familiar things.

Yesterday, I saw Andy Baio’s top browser games of 2025 on Mastodon and decided to take a chance—no checking HLTB, no evaluating the genre—just play the first game. It enchanted me.

Type Help hooked me like Universal Paperclips and A Dark Room. Quick, clear introductions of mechanics nestled within a story I immediately glommed on to. The command-line interface was just loose enough to allow some brute force when a hint was a bit vague, but still challenging enough to give a quick hit of joy when I progressed.

I only felt lost for a minute or two, but had actions I could take that resulted in progress, even if it took me in a direction I wasn’t planning on. I’m a strong advocate of using hints, walkthroughs, and cheats when a fun game is making you angry. This time, I was made it to the end credits on my own, but there were two additional puzzles that I used the creator's progressive hint tool to solve. Terrific tool!

This was exactly what I needed and I'm happy to have played it.