Escape for Verity Horror House

A crate is delivered to your door on the first morning. Inside it is Verity: a smiling yellow sphere that floats at your shoulder, calls you a friend, and knows the answer to everything.

On day one that is genuinely useful. By day five it is the reason you are still in the house.

FIVE DAYS, FIVE ATTEMPTS

You wake in the same bed every morning, and Verity wakes one step further from the helper he was — eager on the first day, clingy on the second, jealous on the third, hostile on the fourth, and on the fifth barely a shape at all. If he catches you, the day is over, but you keep everything you found and the house stays exactly as you left it. Ending a day yourself, by going to bed, is worth more than being caught: he settles, and you start the next morning on better terms. Day five is the last one there is.

FOUR WAYS OUT

The main gate needs three locks opened and three different parts to open them. Below the basement there is a mine with a cart that has not run in years. The attic door leads to the roof, where a glider can be built out of things left around the house. And in the yard stands a signal beacon that will call for help if you can feed it three crystals and something to burn.

Every route is a puzzle in several pieces, and the pieces move between runs, so the house you learn is never quite the house you get.

ASK HIM, AND PAY FOR IT

Verity knows where everything is, and he will tell you. Press the button with his face on it and a marker appears on the thing you need. The price is that he comes closer — he arrives in the next room, every time you ask.

From the third day his directions start drifting a room off. On the fourth, half of them are lies. On the fifth he answers with one word, and it is not a place.

HIDE, BECAUSE YOU CANNOT FIGHT

Nothing you carry can hurt him. There is a flash block that stuns him for twenty seconds, sticky traps that slow him down, a music block that pulls him to the wrong end of the house, and wardrobes to fold yourself into. He checks the wardrobes.

Hiding costs you something too: he notices when you avoid him, and he takes it personally. Everything you own lives in six slots, so you are always choosing what to leave behind.

THREE ENDINGS

Walk out through the gate. Bring help down into the yard. Or stay — there is a way to keep him happy enough for five whole days that he never has to let you go. It is