Sun Wukong: The Comprehensive Account

A dark door, a hair-thin line of red light, and two seconds through a gap two inches wide: a small blur crosses a red-gold courtyard, and somebody laughs. You will never see his face. Eleven years later, the Court of Heaven orders you to write the official account of what happened that day.

You are Wei Mingzhen, Scribe Sixth Class, in an archive room of black shelves and jade-green tiles. Hong Jingbao, the Senior Scrivener, hands you a three-page summary that says order was restored, and a deadline forty days away. Chancellor Yuan designed the official version. Commander Pine Branch, Sergeant Fang, Records Officer Qian, Keeper Hou of the stables and Lady Tianmu of the Peach Garden each saw the Havoc in Heaven from a different place. The Monkey King himself is never on the page: he exists as damage, records, warmth and a laugh.

The desk is the world. Pull records from seven drawers and question witnesses about what you already hold. Mark phrases in four inks: black for fact, red for a discrepancy, blue for a cross-reference, and amber, which you mix yourself, for what the record cannot hold. Sort documents into the seven kinds and catch the fourteen that carry the wrong label. Plot about two hundred time stamps on a red chalk timeline and watch red brackets appear wherever one being could not have been in two places at once. Reading and writing cost nothing; interviews, visits and journeys cost watches, three a day, and the days run out.

Most deduction games end when you find the truth. This one starts its last act there. Every witness is right from where they stood, so most contradictions resolve once you place each reading at its distance. Then you write two accounts from the same facts: a true one that holds everything that matters, and an official one that may tell no lie and must still reach the Court's conclusion. Hong reviews it. Leave a two-word door in it for a careful later reader to find. On the last day you lay two identical scrolls in a black case. Hong takes one. Nobody asks which.

A prologue and five dockets run from the courtyard and the Bureau of Immortal Medicine to the Peach Garden at night and the Heavenly Jail. Beyond the map lie Potalaka, where an interview is spoken only while you keep still, and Five Elements Mountain, where you press your hand to warm stone and a voice answers in five lines. Fourteen painted places, twelve people to interview and an optional epilogue make about seven to nine hours over forty in-game days, single-player, with no combat and no time limit on any input.

Nothing is levelled or ground for. Progress lies on the desk: a new layer for every docket, and Wei's fingertips darkening a shade each week. A Second Reading starts again with your old amber marks faint in the margins.

Based on The Comprehensive Account by Chisato Funabashi, a novel that retells Journey to the West from the Court's archive. The seven kinds, the four inks, the split record, the red chalk timeline, the five lines through stone and the two scrolls all come from the book, and the game keeps its rules: he is never seen clearly, and nothing is fought.

Sun Wukong: The Comprehensive Account is a complete game design for PC. Development has not started. A tablet version may follow.