Submission #9996: Twisted_Eye's DOS Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Tale of Orpheo's Curse in 16:38.526

Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of Orpheo's Curse

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

INTRO CHAPTER

• Immediately, skeptical Alex starts nagging his sister Terry that they shouldn't be trying to break into this haunted theater. As an aspiring magician, though, Terry would love to see the remnants of this old vaudeville stage that once hosted the Great Orpheo! Naturally, the first step is to moonwalk into a rat-infested alleyway.
• Walking backwards is done at times during this run for a couple different reasons. First, the game has several locations where characters will stop and talk to themselves or each other, and the game freezes all movement until the conversation is complete. Walking backwards, however, means we don't ever see the viewpoint that triggers talking, so the conversation never starts.
• The second reason to walk backwards is that the slowest part of this TAS (that doesn't include conversations) is waiting for the computer to decompress and display each screen that the players view. Time can be saved by showing the same screens multiple times instead of looking at the rear-views of locations you've already walked through. The player can not open a door or climb a ladder if they are not looking at them, though, so the benefits of walking backward are on a room-to-room basis.
• Once Alex and Terry enter the theater and encounter their first ghost, the game normally fades into the first Midnight Society sequence, who explain the setting, and then the game's title card appears. The game manual helpfully explains that pressing Spacebar at any time here will skip the whole section and jump the game to the first meeting with Orpheo himself. With the exception of the VCR-style Forward and Rewind buttons that appear during comic-book-panel sequences, this is the only time in the whole game that an FMV, conversation, or animation can be skipped once started.
• Speaking of comic-book-panel sequences, this first one has a feature that is sadly underused in this game: clicking on a different part of the page to 'choose your own adventure' as it were. By trying to go back out the door you came in from, a trapdoor will open under Terry, and she will fall into a cavern that eventually opens up into the theater's museum of curios. If instead, you trust Orpheo and go with him, he will transport you instantly to the same room of weird things. You'd think that would be faster! But the amount of conversation you have to go through on this path takes much more time than traversing the extraneous cave. Either way, Alex is now kidnapped, and Terry has to go alone.

TERRY'S CHAPTER

• Terry has to explore the lower floors of the theater during her section, and it's all pretty open-ended. For new players, the game directs them into a series of cool features and "wax" displays (likely the game programmers doing self-inserts), and then parts of the theater that slowly reveal the backstory of the theater's tragic downfall. Orpheo selected his daughter Elizabeth to be his new assistant, which made his elder daughter Mary so jealous that she cast a horrible curse that, oops! monkey paw!, caught her up in it as well. Everyone is dead and we have to break the curse and free the ghosts before midnight.
• None of the above is necessary to solve the game, however. We moonwalk through a room full of wax figures of monsters like vampires and mummies (Orpheo speaks threateningly at Terry from a distance if you walk through face-forward, which would make this path slower than going through the other part of the wax museum, which speedrunners usually take), and enter the wax moulding room. We take a finger candle (not strictly necessary but faster than going without it) and unlock a secret door. Climbing up and tripping the fire sprinklers to put out the molten wax doesn't need to be done yet but it's faster to just get it out of the way here. Beyond the secret door is Mary's dressing room, and on a sewing table here we find a key with a skull on it. (Sadly not a 'skeleton key,' that would be too easy!)
• Exiting back through the wax moulding room, we moonwalk through another corridor to avoid time loss, and use the lit finger-candle to enter a maintenance door that would have too dark to enter without. Through Maintenance and into Costumes, and then into the Props and Scenery room. The skull key unlocks a drawer hidden back here, but Orpheo sends a wax skeleton to capture Terry! We run back all the way to Maintenance and into the Boiler Room. Wax skeleton rip.
• There was a doorknob in that drawer that we need to go back for. From there, we go upstairs and enter the Music Room. In the Orchestra Pit we see wax figures of musicians, and inspecting the conductor's stand to see the name of the piece ("The Magic Flute,") we interact with the flute and find Orpheo's Magic Wand. From there, we head back to the corridor above Props and Scenery and use the doorknob to enter the dressing room of the Amazing Aldo. There he is!
• oh he dead. His ghost promises to help us if we have the Wand, so we head back to the wax museum. Yes, this room has a secret exit that goes directly there, but Terry unavoidably talks to herself multiple times if you go that way. This TAS saves ~8 seconds by going the long way and manually retracing all steps instead.
• Aldo slipped a gold key into the pocket of wax Harry Houdini, and with that we can enter the Magician's Workshop back in the Maintenance basement. We would have known that Alex was trapped in here, but we didn't know that he would have been sawed into thirds! A quick little movement puzzle and Terry brings him back to normal, and the two are briefly reunited.
• They discover a Teleportation Box and meet a ghost that explains how to use it, and tells them the five items they need to find to break the curse. Alex enters the T. Box first and presses the button that teleports him to a graveyard underneath the theater, but Orpheo kidnaps Terry before she can follow!

ALEX'S CHAPTER

• By this point in the game, players know what's going on and what they need to do, so Alex's chapter is focused on locating the last few magic items. The teleportation boxes lead to three destinations here that can be somewhat done in any order.
• 1: Graveyard. Orpheo built a little mausoleum underneath the theater for himself, and graves were dug out nearby for everyone else as they ended up dying from the curse. We grab a lantern, moonwalk to avoid a ghostly attack from Mary, grab a shovel, and enter the mausoleum. Orpheo's Hat is in the wall here, and thankfully we don't need to have Alex learn that fact before he'll strike the wall. Moonwalking back again, and a secret door opens back into the Magic Workshop. We enter the teleportation box again.
• 2: Under the Stairs. We materialize in a room in front of a tin monkey. The TAS avoids most of the game's scares but yes, clicking on that monkey initiates a jumpscare! There are many in the game, and the limitations of 1994 computers keep them from actually being all that scary. Anyway, this room is home to a sort of key rack--we already found the gold key, the blue key is hidden in the endgame section, but we happily take the green and red keys. Players would know what the green key is for, but that only Terry can reach the box it unlocks, so we need to find a way to get it to her.
• Thankfully, that can be done in the very next room. After solving a quick puzzle to open a secret door, Alex meets the head of Felicia, who promises to help him just like Aldo helped Terry earlier. We put the green key into the purple box nearby--she'll teleport it over to Terry later. From there, we head up to the third floor and solve a puzzle that IRL took me decades to solve. Another secret door opens, another teleportation box is found, and we head to another destination.
• 3: Rooftop. Heading forward from here only leads us to a blue door, and the blue key is on the other side of it. So instead, upon rematerializing, we immediately turn around and head through a door and down some stairs. Behind the stairs is a doorway leading to one side of the catwalks. They're in serious disrepair, and there are three separate sections of catwalks that can only be reached by separate areas of the theater.
• In this section, we can add a harness to our inventory, but we're then attacked by some wacky electrical cartoon demon! There is power outlet nearby, and by plugging a cable in, the electricity monster is lured into the circuit, and unplugging the cable afterward traps the monster in a light bulb, effectively shorting it out and killing it. We head back into the theater and get attacked by a living rope even, but it's attached to a sand bag and shoving that off the railing gets rid of that problem, too.
• Now we can unblock a door and we're back on the second floor. We enter a door to the upper seats, and fast forward through a stage performance by a dead clown. It isn't funny but he did throw Orpheo's Cape at us, so that's three of five down. Up the stairs again and into the same secret door as before but this time, we enter a secret door that leads to a different section of the catwalks. Orpheo's Medallion is hanging precariously from a chandelier, and the harness we grabbed earlier gives Alex just enough leverage he needs to safely reach out and grab it. We have everything we need to finish Alex's chapter now.
• Heading back out of the secret doors we came in, we poke around the hallway and see a painting of Orpheo. the eye balls of the painting can be rotated, however, and pointing them both upwards unlocks yet another secret staircase. It leads to the red door, and our red key opens it, and oh crap it's Orpheo, Alex is captured yet again.

END CHAPTER

• Terry gets one more brief moment on her own to explore--she's locked in Orpheo's private dressing room, but there is a teleportation box here. It's faulty, and anyone sent through it will automatically return to this dressing room after a short period of time. Terry will have to do all she can to finish loose ends in that short couple minutes of time.
• First, there is a purple box here, much like the one Alex saw near Felicia's ghost head. She has transported his green key here for Terry to use, just in time. Terry now gets in the teleportation box, and can safely teleport into Limbo if you want to experience Hell for a couple minutes before receiving a game over! Instead, she teleports back to the wax moulding room, and immediately climbs up a chain to where the green box is hiding. Green key unlocks it, and she picks up the final macguffin: Orpheo's Eyes. Since we've done all we need to do, the game skips the rest of the timer and sends us immediately back to Orpheo's dressing room. If the player doesn't have all five of the magic items, the game ends here no matter what, but we're ready to roll, so we're allowed to continue.
• Orpheo brings Terry together with Alex, and then leaves to make final preparations for the night's magic act that is sure to fail. They're now locked in Mary's private apartment on the very top floor, surrounded by relics of witchcraft and black magic she used to betray her family and friends, but it is here that we can finally break the curse for good. Peeking into a closet cursed by the hellwails of Limbo, we find the blue key, and then Alex and Terry fighting accidentally unlocks a secret door behind Mary's bedroom. Mary and Orpheo are here.
• kinda sorta. The "Mary" that would have been attacking the two teens throughout the museum (if I hadn't been moonwalking and avoiding cutscene triggers) is actually a hologram generated by some voodoo-doll-style candle, and Terry melts the candle to dispel the apparition. And the "Orpheo" that it was guarding is, well, the real Orpheo, body transformed into a wax figure.
• Placing the five magic items onto the wax figure breaks the curse! Orpheo('s ghost) is freed from it's decades of wax prison, the Orpheo that has been menacing us all this time is transformed back into Mary (oops! monkey paw!), and to cap it all off, a magic trick can finally be successful performed on the mainstage. Orpheo tells the two that until that is done, however, Mary can still have enough power to re-cast the curse! She will recover and give chase at this point, soooo gotta go!
• Racing back through Mary's Apartment, we see the blue door from earlier, which we can now unlock with the blue key we found. Back onto the roof and through the doorway from earlier, we head down a set of spiral stairs we could not take earlier and end up backstage of the theater. We release a sandbag that is labeled "T. Boxes," and bring them onto the main stage. Time to head on stage and become the main event!
• Alex enters one of the teleportation boxes, hits a button marked with a ? mark, and out steps...Elizabeth, who had been trapped in Limbo all these years! Mary is truly undone, and she crumbles to death on the floor of the theater. But Terry knows there's one last thing that needs to be done: by pushing the two teleportation boxes together, one last blast of magic fuses them together, and Alex is able to step out safe and sound! The magic trick was a grand success, and the ghosts roar in applause and their spirits are freed! The game's true ending achieved, the Midnight Society appears again to award the game player a membership into their club, roll credits.