Chiaroscuro

A life, told in light and dark.

You are born. A light, a heartbeat that is not yours, a face too large and too near. Then the clock begins to count: years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and it does not stop until the life does.

Chiaroscuro is a quiet game about one whole life. There are no meters and no numbers to manage: no health bar, no happiness score, no stats screen. How the life is going shows only in the words, the light and the music. The glow around the clock warms and cools with the life inside it. The piano plays more notes when things are hard, never faster. The people and places you are held by sit around you as small lights, and they tremble when something is wrong.

Time is the true resource. Around the clock, parts of your life wait as soft lights: rest, people, school, work, the things you love doing. You cannot tend them all. Choosing one costs attention, and choosing what matters costs time: a short walk is an afternoon, an evening course is two years of Tuesdays. The clock never asks you to pick a speed. It slows when there is something to decide and drifts on when there is not.

Choices that weigh something. Say yes, say not yet, ask them to stay. Take the steady post or the work you would love. Go to the friend who rings at eleven, or finish the work due at nine. What you choose leaves marks, and the marks change the odds of what comes next: who you meet, whether the job holds, how long a marriage lasts, how the body keeps. Some paths come to you side by side, and taking one means the others close.

No life is told twice. Nearly a thousand moments and more than fifteen hundred ways of telling them, keyed to the life you are living: where you were born and to whom, the money in the house, the season, the people still around you. Nothing is told twice in a single life. Thirty-eight things to love doing (the violin, gardening, chess, beekeeping, astronomy, cooking for people, and more) may find you, bloom, fade and, sometimes, come back.

What it is:

• A complete life, from the first hours to the end, at its own pace
• No meters, no numbers (the wallet and the clock are the only exceptions, and the wallet is never exact)
• A solo piano that follows how the life feels: slow and sparse when it is calm, fuller under strain
• Delight, comedy, temper and grief in the same life, because lives have all of them
• A short poem before each life
• Save and continue any life; begin as many as you like

What it is not: a game you win. A life ends. What it was is up to you, and partly not.

A life takes a few hours to live through. You can stop at any point and continue later.

Chiaroscuro is gentle in tone but honest about what lives contain. It includes: death (of parents, partners, friends, and of a child), grief, serious illness and diagnosis, ageing and dementia, a hard childhood (neglect, raised voices, cold and poverty), bullying, drinking, money trouble and debt, divorce, and job loss. Nothing is graphic.

Controls:

• Mouse: click a light to tend that part of life, click a choice to make it, click a person or place to hear a line about them
• Space: pause
• Esc: menu (save, load, leave)