Do not flip

How to play Do not flip

There is a panel on the wall with one big switch and a sign above it that says not to flip it. Tap the switch, or press Space or Enter, and flip it anyway. Something always flips it back. At first that is a small hand from a hatch, but every flip brings a new reaction and they get stranger as you go. The hand gets slower and grumpier, a second switch turns up that is wired the wrong way round, the panel starts talking back, the lights go out and the switch reappears somewhere else, a tiny official arrives with forms, the switch gets a lid you have to lift first, the hand brings a friend and in the end the room itself starts to tilt. Two flips before each of those, the room drops a hint: the hatch rattles, the lights flicker or the floor creaks. Meanwhile the panel is really a door. It creaks open a crack at flip five and swings wide at fifteen, and behind it sits a green armoured shutter that rattles up a crack at thirty and rolls away at fifty. Its switch is a heavy slide bolt that you push up. Last comes a smaller mustard door with an old power switch. Hold the switch down and it keeps flipping by itself, about once a second, so the quieter stretches go by quickly. The counter sits at the top, and the bar under the switch shows your rank and how many flips are left to the next one. Every day the sign gets a new line and one rare visitor is sure to drop by. A steel plate beside the doors holds three red lights. One turns green at one hundred flips, one when you type the right code into the keypad behind the painting and one when the key from under the plant is in the lock. Tap the painting until it falls, read the code off the clock and tap the plant until the pot gives up its key. With all three lights green the last door opens, you see who has been flipping the switch back all along and what they keep in there, and you get a medal for the wall before the panel starts over with a new sign. Walk away at any time to see how far you got and challenge a friend, your count is saved for next time.

Tips

• The story runs in the same order for everyone, so you can compare notes on what happens at flip fifty
• A few rare visitors turn up at random in each run, and the end card counts how many of them you have seen
• Once the lid arrives it takes two taps per flip, one to lift it and one to flip, or just hold the switch down
• Come back tomorrow for a new line on the sign and a different rare visitor
• Your rank goes from Obedient to Curious, Restless, Persistent, Stubborn, Unemployable and Ungovernable
• The clock has stopped for a reason. The digits its three hands point at are the code for the keypad
• The code, the owner behind the last door and the treasure they guard change every day
• Every finished run hangs a medal on the wall and puts up a new sign
• There are small clicks and thunks, but everything works the same with the sound off

About Do not flip

Machines whose only job is to switch themselves off go back to the early 1950s, when Marvin Minsky came up with the idea and Claude Shannon built one for his desk at Bell Labs. Do not flip turns that old joke into a story of one hundred flips, with three doors to get through and somebody different waiting behind the last one every day, from an old robot or a garden gnome to a hamster in a wheel. Every reaction was written and drawn for this game in its own flat style: a dusty blue panel on an oat striped wall, a pink sign, a lilac hand with a striped mustard sleeve, a teal friend with a dotted coral sleeve and a tiny official in a tall hat. More than seventy reactions run in a fixed order that escalates chapter by chapter. In the first thirty flips every gap gets a small reaction of its own, later plain flip backs fill the gaps, and a handful of rare ones are mixed in at random, so no two runs look exactly the same. Everything is drawn in code and the sounds are synthesised in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere; your count, your medals and the rare moments you have seen are saved on your own device.

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