Time to Play Curios: Albrecht Manor
When it's Halloween, I like to play creepy Halloweenie games. Ok, well I might like spooky games all year-round, but for the horror season it's time to pull out all stops. When I received this package in the mail last month, I knew it'd be perfect for the weekend before Halloween:
Curios: Albrecht Manor is "an epistolary horror mystery experience" by Seb Pines, the first in the new Curios series from Good Luck Press. There is no single person who runs the game. No one knows what they're about to open, other than what you see on the blurb.
The notion of the game is that the players are "Researchers" of "The Archive" who receive evidence and ephemera leftover after the appearance of supernatural phenomena. The details on the Archive is sparse, but you an unbothered dayjob vibe oozes from the tone. This manila envelope is all you're going to get, and your job is to make some declarative statements by the end of the research.
It's a fun space to play. I could see the experience of play spanning the spectrum between a total LARP and completely player-facing. For our game, we were closer to the player-facing end of that spectrum, and had a fabulous evening.
The Albrecht Manor manila envelope contains 11 letters and two postcards, along with a short mailing notice and the "Archive" report card. Like any good horror story, the letters start off tame with bits of weird, yet quickly start including photos, newspaper snippets, blueprints and administrative papers.
From tearing open the letters to the difference in paper textures, styles and handwritten bits were thrilling to handle. We were surprised how each piece, and sometimes innocuous details at first, came back to have us rifling back through what we'd read before.
With the stack of letters in the center of the table, without prior discussion, we naturally began to play by each picking up a letter/postcard, and circling, writing notes, and sharing weird details. This created a fun, anachronistic revelation of details, as sometimes one bit would go unremarked earlier would pop up in someone else's letters.
When an important detail came to the forefront of this developing narrative, I appreciated how the spotlight would pass around each of us adding more context or details or asking questions we weren't sure how to answer. But it's extremely difficult to discuss direct details without spoiling the contents of the letters. The discovery of certain documents and finding the inter-connectivity is the fun of this game.
The game comes with a single paragraph of instruction, which can seem daunting, but I was in awe of how the physical presentation made space for our own curiosity to define the bounds of how we approached the mystery. We examined photos under different types of lamplight, tried using the zoom on our smartphones as impromptu magnifying lenses, and folded paper in all sorts of ways. Most importantly, we were enraptured by this game for nearly three hours and were astonished at how fast the time passed.
We all appreciated how there is no direct, singular answer, and that we the players were the ones to define the story from our collective interpretation. It's not a good mystery, especially a ghost story mystery, if you're not left with more questions by the end.
Spoilers at the next heading!
Three specific moments literally gave me chills. I don't want to spoil those here. After the photo and line break is the report that was sent to the Archivist at curiosarchive.net. I realize now that we didn't "even "formally" discuss how we would classify the Albrecht Manor phenomena, but the classification is hinted at.
While I don't intend to spoil specific details in the letters, the submitted report has major spoilers. So if you haven't played this game, don't read any further!
Submitted Report to the Archivist
The first sentence on the first postcard, unwittingly, says it all, "the house is a dream."
This group of Archive researchers have deemed this household, built by one Damian Albrecht, to be a spiritual machine. This trap inhabits the mind of its occupants, and grows and shifts according to its creator's and past occupants' hopes and dreams of a warm household. The researchers are even hesitant to call this a haunting, but agree the house appears to be a spatio-temporal machination propelled by the spirits it is required to consume to keep operating. The fire, in this interpretation, is a convenient excuse for the house to re-enter its slumbering stasis. The researchers' consensus is that there must be only one true fire, but could not access WHEN that may be.
The researchers agreed, though without substantial evidence, the purpose of this machine is to sustain not only long life to its creator, Damian Albrecht, but also to impose HIS dream onto others, and subsume their dreams to feed his own. Again, the fire is a convenient cover-up for the displaced spirits Albrecht has trapped.
The researchers were divided on several facets, foremost questioning the actual existence of the principal figures: Alex Dunn and Anne Wilson. Could it be that Alex Dunn is in fact Albrecht? Has the persona of Alex Dunn created the character of Anne Wilson to represent the inhabitants of St. Ann? Will there be an all-consuming fire that destroys the town, and this house (and letters) are calling the community to action, as a sort of warning? Does Albrecht Manor's machinery twist and channel the powers of the Catholic Saint Ann, whose emblem is a Door, to imbue itself with supernatural power? If Alex Dunn is/was a real person, were they drawn to the house due to past trauma involving Anne and the implied kitchen fire that took place in the past? Did this oft-alluded-to fire kill Anne?
Many loose ends remain, but these Archive Researchers remain confident that the initial readings of the Albrecht Manor as deviating from the traditional haunting are correct. The "ghosts" are most likely Albrecht himself, and the temporal echoes of the Manor's past occupants. We put forth that through mechano-spiritual insights, "Damian Albrecht" built Albrecht Manor to trap people into its/his dreams of a perfect home. As a single household can never be "perfect" in his madness, the Manor and its master yearn to consume more ideals to feed this imperfect spiritual machine.
Thank you for reading, dear Archivist.
All best,
Chris Air & Friends.
