Frame343

The more you look, the closer it gets

A short psychological horror game built around a photo investigation: recover the records on a missing man's camera, then use real photographs and their timestamps to work out where he went on the day he disappeared.

You can only see it while you hold

Deep in the deleted files are records that are completely dark. Hold Develop, and the camera builds up light, little by little, until they come into view. Simply brightening the image shows nothing but stripes.
At 60%, the details come back. At 100%, the camera gives you the distance to the subject.

But while you hold, the camera is looking for a face. When it locks focus, it takes the shot.
Letting go doesn't end it — not until the light on the desk camera goes out.
The camera is supposed to be facing the wall. So what is it seeing right now?

On its own, a false detection

The camera puts "face" frames on photos that should have no one in them — on leaves, on moss, on the darkness under a floor. They look a little like ghost photos, but any single one can be written off as a false detection.
Line them up, though, and the same arrangement appears in photos of different places — a little larger each time.

One missing frame. One man who never came home.

On 16 August 2011, a man set out alone for a small town in the hills and never came back.
At 14:58 he called: "Something strange showed up at the shrine, so I deleted it."

You work at a small data recovery company. Today you are the only one on duty, and there is no one else in the building.
On your desk sits his camera. The client is his younger sister, and she has two requests:

• Please bring back the missing shot.

• Please tell me where my brother walked that day.

In the camera's records, file number 343 is missing.

The records are the evidence

Timestamps, a missing number, his habit of retaking a photo from the same spot right after deleting it, small details in the photos, the camera's activity log. Every clue is in the records.
Match the dark records against the daytime photos, piece together where he went and when, and answer the questions in your report — mostly by marking what you find in the photos.

Features

• Photo horror built from real photographs (supplied material, edited). No monsters. The faces hide in the texture of the photographs.

• Five endings. Every ending leaves numbers behind on a report copy in the same format.

• Short horror: about 25–30 minutes for your first playthrough and about 10–15 minutes for later ones (estimates). Autosaves at checkpoints between sections.

• 14 Steam achievements, none of them missable: you can earn any of them by replaying from a checkpoint or starting a new playthrough.

• Steam Cloud syncs your progress. Settings such as language and volume are not synced.

• Play with mouse and keyboard, or with a gamepad (using an on-screen cursor).

• Japanese, English, and Simplified Chinese (on-screen text only). Your Steam language is selected by default, and you can switch anytime from the title screen or Settings.

• Comfort and accessibility settings: Reduce flashing, Gaze detection (Lenient), Hints on/off, Brightness Check, four volume controls, Mute unfocused, and Vibration on/off.

Content notes

• The story deals with a missing person. There is no violence or gore.

• Much of the game is dark, and face-like patterns appear in the photographs. Please use Settings > Brightness Check to adjust the brightness before you play.

• The screen flashes at the moment the camera shoots. Settings > Reduce flashing turns the flash black. Even with Reduce flashing on, small parts of the screen (such as a face frame or the camera's light) still brighten briefly at times.

• The game itself never goes online; the Steam client syncs achievements and saves (Steam Cloud). The game does not use your PC's camera, microphone, or location.

This is a work of fiction. The company, stations, lines, people, and case that appear in it are all fictitious.
Photographs: supplied material (edited by Vexrane). Real names and people caught in the photographs have been altered so they cannot be identified.