No One Has To Die

• Title — no-one has to die. • Developer — Sammy Madafiglio • Artist — Cindy Xu • Composer — Jesse Valentine • Platforms — HTML5 • Genre — Puzzle • Engine — Construct • Released — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 22:51 +0000 • Modes — Single-player

The player (the 'Visitor') is making a delivery to the control room of the Fenix Corporation Headquarters when a fire breaks out, triggering the security system and an evacuation. Four characters still in the building log on to the communications network. The player uses the control room proceeds through a series of levels in which they are required to make decisions about which characters are saved and which are claimed by the fire, with each path ultimately leading to one survivor: • Christina is an employee of the Fenix Corporation who raises suspicion about the mysterious activities of the business. If the player chooses to save Christina, she reveals she lit the fire and killed the guards, stating that she sought to stop the activities of the Fenix Corporation, explaining that the corporation killed her mother after she disappeared from an "experiment", returning her mother's body after experimenting on her brain. • Lionel is the CEO of the Fenix Corporation. If the player chooses to save Lionel, he explains that the business is a front for experiments in time travel and that the Corporation have developed a fully functioning time machine. He notes that the machine does not manipulate time, but transports a person's consciousness through time. A test subject attempted to travel back through time, but disappeared. • Steve is an employee of the Fenix Corporation who is close to Christina and asks the player to save her instead. If the player chooses to save Steve, he is distraught that the player sacrificed Christina, but upon escape discovers a file about the "Phoenix Experiment" that proves the existence of a time loop and proves that Christina is still alive. • Troy initially claims he killed the security staff in the building and lit the fire. If the player chooses to save him, Troy reveals he is an employee and did not light the fire, as he is in a time loop and has already witnessed the player make decisions about who to save. He entered a room named TEMPEST, which sent him back to the start of the fire. Once all available endings have been played, a new path appears in which all characters return to the initial loop with knowledge of the events that occurred in their own timeline. The characters each provide the player with the codes they found in their respective endings, granting full access and the ability to lock all doors at once and "no-one has to die." Lionel reveals that Christina's mother is not dead, and when she was sent back in time, she did not return to her body, instead lost in time and searching for a host consciousness across other timelines. Extrapolating from this observation, Lionel concludes that TEMPEST has united each character from separate timelines. Surviving the fires on each level, the characters meet, with the exception of Christina, who reveals she has been to this timeline before, and makes the decision to instead re-enter TEMPEST to travel far back in time to continue her attempts to save her mother.

• Illustration — A screenshot of gameplay in no-one has to die. Players complete a series of levels in a branching path that represent the effects of choices made in the game. In each level, there is a grid floor plan of people, locations, and switches that can be interacted with. The objective of each level is to save one character by preventing fire from spreading to their location, with fire travelling one square in the grid per move. In order to do so, players take turns move characters, flip switches starting and stopping the flow of water, and remotely lock a limited number of doors in each level. If characters are in the same grid as fire or water, they will die. Levels are completed when the flow of fire and water has stopped. Depending on the choices made by the player to save certain characters, new levels will be revealed across playthroughs, requiring the player to complete the game multiple times to receive new endings that convey more information about the story. A menu allows the player to return to different branches in the story to minimise repetition.