TALLY

A penny a person

Hallowshire, 1847. The Vestry has made you census enumerator for the county, and it pays by the entry: a penny for every person you write down. There are 1,847,201 of them. You start in the churchyard of Lower Hallow with a pen and a ledger, and every click on the page puts one more stroke in the book.

Beside your count the book keeps a second figure, the clicks the room has heard. Almost from the start it is one ahead of you. The Vestry calls the difference a Discrepancy, and it wants it kept low.

Who counts for you

"My son can hold a pen. He is eleven. He must not sit idle." Widow Reed's boy is the first to sign on. After him come Moss the gravedigger ("I put them in. I can count them going in."), a clerk whose sums hold, the old bell-ringer, and a doctor who offers his list so the count is finished sooner. The roster tells you how long each new hire takes to pay for itself, and they all keep counting while you are away.

Returns from the next parishes

Census papers come in from the parishes around you, and some of them are wrong. A baby listed with a trade. A death dated next week. The same man written in twice. File the honest ones and send the false ones back. File a lie and it comes back struck through: its people leave your book, and one of your workers goes with them.

The Reading

Every so often the bell rings for a Reading. The room goes quiet, your crews all but stop, and a hand reaches across the desk and lies flat on your page. Then the Vestry reads names from your own book back to you, one at a time, and you decide whether each one stays. Keep writing while the hand is there and every stroke is counted against you.

The book changes

Names begin to appear at the foot of your page, in a hand that isn't yours. The paper gets cheaper as the count moves out from the parish to the county. Later the pages arrive already written, the weather at the window keeps rising, and the clock in the room starts to miss.

It has an ending

TALLY is five acts and two to three hours long, and it ends when the county is counted. There is no endless grind. The last return on your desk is your own household. After that you can begin a new census, and the book will remember that you have been here before.

Details

• Played with the mouse. You type your name once, on the ledger's label.
  
• Candlelight, a harmonium, and someone behind the wall reading the names aloud.
  
• No ads, no microtransactions, no account, and no internet connection.
  
• Your save is a line of text you can copy out and keep.
  
• Windows and Linux.