Count the Silver

I've been messing around with some of the free indie games on /r/creepygaming recently, and I can tell you there are some pretty good things out there. I'm not entirely sure what I played last night falls into that category.

I got Pirate Pete and the Deafening Silence last night from a slightly skeevy looking, but safe website called itch.io. It's a cheap flash game point and click, but it's free.

The menu is brightly colored with happy civil-war sounding fife music and a smiling cartoon sun. When I hit play, I was given a message about the lead designer having a break down, but then it was back to bright colors, chirping birds, and the smiling sun as the game showed me Petes house. From there I spent about 10 min trying to click on random things in Petes house without getting any feed back until I got the map in the left hand corner by mistake.

The map had a few simple places I could go, and more unlocked as I kept moving through the game, and thank god it had a button to pull up a to do list so I had any idea what I was doing in the game. The first thing it had me do was "Meet Lookie Lou" at "Lookout Cliff" where an alarmed cartoon exclaimed about red coats through a speech bubble. I clicked on the eye piece of the telescope and got to see a far off view of "Fort Dis." Every time I came back to "Lookout Cliff" throughout the game it always let me look through the telescope despite nothing changing.

Each time I completed one of the little tasks, I'd pull up the to do list again, get my marching orders, and then move on. But as I completed tasks, I started to notice little changes; characters that I'd talked to in the past were missing, birds and butterflies were becoming more scarce, the sun had stopped smiling, and the game as a whole was losing it's cheery background noise.

Finally, the game asked me to get a gun and give it to one of the less reputable looking characters. After I did that, I checked the to do list again, but it some how sent me back to the very first level as the game reset itself. I'm not sure if that was a design flaw or something the apparently unstable designer wrote in on purpose to slow me down. But I went back to the forum where I'd first got the game and found my way past.

After I gave up the gun I couldn't check my to do list again until after I'd gone back to Black Beards Bar and clicked on the bar tender. After that, the scene didn't change. So, I opened up the map again to see where I could go, but the music was gone. When I clicked to go back to the bar, the scene had drastically changed. The frowning sun had vanished all together and been replaced by a less cartoony moon, all the sound except for the far off sound of waves was absent, and Pirate Pete looked nothing like he used to. His brightly colored clothing had been replaced with a soiled, grey vest and pants and the harmless wooden sword he'd been carrying around the whole game was now a cutlass.

I checked the other locations and every time was met with a silent, run down version of what it had been. Even the trees had changed color from green to brown and orange. Fort Dis was finally unlocked, but wasn't interactive and just looked like a raided version of what I'd seen so often in the telescope. So, I went up to Lookout Cliff to see if the telescope had updated to the new version of the Fort, but I was appalled to see that it no longer pointed where it used to. Now, it pointed to a rock arch in the sea with silhouettes of people hanging down toward the water.

The to do list simply said count the silver. When I clicked the silver in the open safe of Petes basement the game ended. It threw me back to what I thought was the main menu, but was missing a button or two. I decided to see what else had changed and clicked "Play" again. It started me in the darkness again, Pete is no longer anywhere to be found, and when I clicked on the map to see where I could go, it just ended the game.

I don't really understand what happened, and I'm not sure if I want to, but that can't be it. The game had accidental or purposeful loops before, maybe I just hit another one of those.

I haven't found a way further into the game yet, and I haven't found anyone who can help, but if you guys have any info, please let me know.