UNDERSTUDY

Three sessions. Ninety minutes each. Never break character.

You're a stage actor who has been very good, several times, in front of almost nobody. Then a woman in a buttoned coat offers you nine thousand pounds for continuity work: a family lost someone, and for three evenings you will walk in their side door and be him.

His name was Daniel Marsh. He drowned eleven months ago at a reservoir, in October, in the dark.

His wife wants a performance. His eleven-year-old daughter has not been told there's anything to perform.

You learn his walk. You learn his laugh — it has a hitch in it, like it starts as something else and converts. You learn where he put his keys.

And somewhere around the second session you notice that nobody in that house will talk about the room at the end of the upstairs landing, the one with grey tape across the frame and a line of light underneath.

UNDERSTUDY is a branching story about grief, performance, and how much of yourself you can lend out before the loan stops being a loan.

What it is

• Six chapters. Roughly 45–60 minutes a run.
• Six endings. Your choices are tracked quietly across four hidden measures — how deep into the role you go, how much the widow trusts you, how attached the child gets, and how much of the truth you actually dig up. The strongest endings only open if you earned them.
• Real branching. About half the scenes change between playthroughs. Some options never appear unless you found the thing that unlocks them.
• Full cast, fully expressive. Every character is drawn live in the browser with per-line expressions and lighting.
• No install, no download. Plays in the browser, works offline, one file, no external assets.

Controls

• Click or Space — advance
• 1–4 — pick an option
• S save · M mute · ≡ menu

Progress saves automatically. Endings you've found are remembered between runs.

A note

Contains: grief, bereavement, a child being deliberately deceived by adults, drowning, and end-of-life care. 

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