THE PARTY

How to play

• Move — WASD or the arrow keys. Sidewalks and crosswalks only; the roads are not yours on foot.
• Bat form — SPACE. Fly over the trick or treaters, and over the roads. It costs NIGHT, and when the NIGHT runs dry it costs BLOOD instead.
• Knock / talk — E. On a door, or on a monster you can actually see. Wrong door means candy, and candy means children.
• Dump the candy — Q. Drop the bag on the pavement, lose the tail.
• Read a buried tip — click any card in the deck that is not already on top and it comes to the front. The cards are the count: a face-down card is a tip nobody has given you yet.
• Pause — ENTER. It is also the key that starts the night, picks a line on the front door, and deals a fresh one from an end card.
• A different night — hold ENTER and press R. New city, new door, new liars.
• Mute — M. Zoom — [ and ]. Back, on the cards — BACKSPACE.

There is no Escape key here on purpose: in a fullscreen embed Escape belongs to the browser, and it would drop you out of fullscreen every time you tried to pause.

Two things worth knowing

Black cats are a gift. Walk into one and you get 30 seconds of vampire vision: the living go grey, the lamps turn out to be torches, and the monsters stop looking like somebody’s kid. The cats go with it.

The city is never the same twice. It is cut rather than drawn — one square of ground halved and halved again until the pieces are blocks, with some of the cuts undone on the way back up. About eighty blocks, a hundred and fifty buildings, a hundred and twenty-five red doors, and a new arrangement of all of it every time you press ENTER + R.

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The clock strikes twelve. The lamps go out in rows.
A hundred doors — and one of them still glows.
Inside, the damned are dancing with the dead;
nobody thought to tell you what they said.

The card was never written, never sent.
They only hoped you’d guess what silence meant.
You didn’t. So you fix your collar, go,
six minutes till the sunrise ends the show.

They’ll point you east. They’ll swear to you it’s west.
And half of them are lying. Take your best.
Knock anywhere — they’ll fill your bag with sweets,
and every child in town will smell the treats.

Find the right door before the sky turns red,
or be the little pile the broom will spread.
The party’s going on. It always was.
You simply weren’t invited.

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SABOROSA is Gabriel Góes & Christian Miranda. Music by Karina D’Alessandre.