Games Like Frame343

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:

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

You can only see it while you hold

Deep in the deleted files are records that are completely dark. Hold Develop, and the camera layers light, little by little, until they come into view. Brightening the screen shows nothing but bands. At 60%, the details come back. At 100%, so does 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 lamp on the camera on your desk goes out. You set the camera down 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: leaves, moss, the darkness under a floor. Any single one could be a false detection. Line them up, though, and the same arrangement appears in photos of different places — a little larger each time.

The records are the evidence

Timestamps, a missing number, a habit of deleting a shot and retaking it on the spot, 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

Content notes

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.