Strategy Guide

The second episode has the fairly simple goal of getting ready for work. This involves moving through your house and accomplishing certain tasks. Anyone who has worked probably has an idea of how to accomplish this task, though there are a few surprises built into the game to make it interesting. There are four rooms in the house.

The Bedroom

This is where you start the game, which makes a lot of sense considering the fact that you just woke up. Granted, when you consider some of the people I know, I could have also set the starting location on a stranger’s lawn and had the dizziness effect continue through the episode. I personally have never woken up on a stranger’s lawn so have no experience with getting ready for work when I am on a lawn, and I certainly don’t know of too many lawns that have digital alarm clocks on them.

There are two things you can do in the bedroom. Going back to bed, which for the player is not an option. The second option is the computer screen. Some people may have noticed that there is a certain program running in the background. Sadly, the program in question is now being run as part of the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - boinc.berkeley.edu ) project, which is something I am not running as my spare CPU cycles are going towards other calculations (some of the results of these calculations may be appearing in future games on this site).

The Living Room

The living room is the central hub of the game, connecting to all the other rooms in the house as well as having the exit. Besides the final exit, there are two activities that can be done in this room.

Watching TV is an option. While I personally don’t like watching TV first thing in the morning, there are lots of people who have to watch the morning news when they get up in the morning. What happens with the TV is actually pretty close to a real world incident I had, though my incident was with a device that attaches to the TV, not the TV itself. I should point out that this is not a requirement of the game.

The more important task (though pointless as you will find out in a future episode of the game) is to pick up the keys that are on the table. For fun, you can also try clicking on the table a second time.

The Kitchen

The kitchen is like the kitchen in any other house. There really is only one thing that can be done here. Clicking on the fridge will get you your breakfast - sort of. Clicking on the fridge a second time is also an option.

The Bathroom

This is a very important room. There are three things that have to be done, and all of them must be done.

Clicking on the shower makes you take a shower, where you will uncover something that you may want to talk to the landlord about. Likewise, most people go to the bathroom first thing in the morning (you can try to go twice).

The sink is a bit different, as while you will not brush your teeth until after you try to eat breakfast.

Checklist

To get out of the house, you need to do the following:

• have breakfast
• shower
• go to the bathroom
• brush teeth
• get keys off table
• open the door

Some of you may be wondering why you don’t have to get dressed. I was going to have this step as well, but wanted to keep the game as gender neutral as possible, and a closet full of cloths would have forced the player’s character into a specific gender. Future episodes that have this problem may have a menu at the beginning of the game that let’s you choose your gender.