Muddy's plan done landed you and your partner in the hoosegow. Now you're fixing to rectificate the matter before the marshal introduces you to the business end of a hangin' rope at dawn.

This game is a wild-west text adventure ("interactive fiction") originally written for the Casual Gameplay One-Room Escape Game competition.

It's written in the Inform 7 programming language, and compiles into bytecode that can be executed on a Z-machine interpreter.

(Because the source text straddles the fuzzy line between "code" and "fiction", we've released it on the Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 license.)

To play the game ONLINE

You can play the game directly in Javascript in your browser by clicking right here.

To play the game OFFLINE

1. Grab the latest .zblorb (or .z8) file from the Download bubble to the right.
2. Grab a nice interpreter to play the game: either Zoom for Mac, WinFrotz for Windows, or Gargoyle for Linux. There are also interpreters out there for iPhone ("Frotz" in the AppStore), Android Phone ("Twisty" in the Market), and other esoteric platforms as well.
3. Load the game into the interpreter to play.

If you've never played interactive fiction before: read this simple crib sheet to give you a sense of how the command parser works. It's a limited vocabulary, fairly easy to master.

To modify or compile the game

Clone the mercurial repository using the instructions on the Source tab. Read the README file for further instructions. Of course, we recommend you play the game first, unless you want spoilers. :-)