What It Keeps: Puzzle Box

Marrow Lodge has stood empty for thirty years. The letter said: come alone, and open nothing you cannot close.

WHAT IT KEEPS is a 3D puzzle-box horror game. Every box in the house is a lock. Every face, lid and drawer of every box hides another mechanism, and not one of them tells you its own answer.

HANDS-ON MECHANISMS
Walk around each contraption, lean in, and work it with your fingers: turning wheels, safe dials, pin tumblers, sliding blocks, cipher wheels, mirrors that bend the lantern's beam, weighing beams, gear trains, bells that must be struck back in order, matchsticks against the house, number grids and more. 31 kinds of lock, chained together so that what one opens, another needed.

THE LANTERN
Light it and the house goes dark around the beam. Shine it where you dare: the lockwright wrote his secrets in an ember ink that only burns in its light. Marks, grooves, whole mechanisms. And, at the edge of the light, whatever has been standing in the room with you.

MASSIVE
- 27 chapters across five wings and a finale
- 545 locks and over 700 mechanisms
- Single boxes, whole workshops of machines that depend on each other, and the deep works under the house
- A hidden relic in every chapter, off the main path and harder to reach
- Four endings, decided by what you carried out

HARD ON PURPOSE
Answers are written somewhere else: on a plate behind another lock, in lantern-only ink, torn in two, turned along a cipher wheel, or written backwards. Read the lockwright's notes. He explains his rules exactly once.

FAIR ABOUT MONEY
No ads appear on their own. Stuck on a lock? Lean in to it and ask for its clue: buy one, or watch one ad (offered once every ten minutes). The clue gives that lock's answer, and every clue you get is kept in your Journal to read again for free. Lighting the way to where you should go next is always free.

Play with the sound on. Play in the dark if you can stand to.