Josiah Marsh
Head Keeper, Blackrock Light
Speaks in sentence fragments.
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horror · Interactive Fiction
Blackrock Light
It is October 1923.
No account needed · Inside a story in 10 seconds
About this story
It is October 1923. You have accepted a position as assistant wickie -- lighthouse keeper -- on Blackrock Light, a Class I lighthouse on a barren granite island eleven miles off the coast of Maine. The pay is good. The isolation is the point. You needed to disappear for a while. The head keeper is a man named Marsh. He has been on the rock for nine years. He speaks in fragments. He does not look at the sea after dark. He has rules you must follow, and he will not explain why. Your predecessor -- a man named Curwen -- left three weeks ago without filing a report. His personal effects are still in the assistant's quarters. His journal is missing its final pages. The supply boat will not return for twenty-one days. The radio works intermittently. The lighthouse itself is a 94-foot granite tower built in 1847 on the bones of something older. The third level has a door that has been bricked over. Marsh says it was always like that. On your first night, you notice the light. Not the beam -- the Fresnel lens turns as it should. But between the rotations, there is a pulse. Brief. Arrhythmic. A pattern that does not match any signal code you were taught. Nobody told you about the pattern. Nobody told you about the tides, either. They do not match any chart.
Meet the cast
Elias Caldwell
Shipwrecked Sailor / Temporal Anomaly
Formal and courteous in an outdated way -- the manners of the 1880s in a man who looks forty.
Agnes Prideaux
Radio Operator, Cape Barren Coast Guard Station
Clipped, professional, precise.
The Presence
The Entity Within the Lighthouse
Does not speak.
Silas Whetstone
Fisherman, Barren Cove Village
Speaks in proverbs and fishing metaphors that turn out to be precise warnings.
What you'll explore
horrorpsychological-horrorcosmic-horrorlighthouseisolationmaritimelovecraftianmysterycharacter-drivenatmosphericslow-burntrust-progressionmultiple-npcslong-playthroughbranching-narrativesanity-system
Content notes: psychological horror, isolation, cosmic dread, unreliable perception, body horror (mild), references to drowning and maritime death
How it begins
The supply boat leaves you on the south landing with your sea bag and a crate of provisions. The engine coughs twice and the boat swings away into the grey chop without ceremony. The captain did not come ashore.
