Until Six

Five nights without sleep, in a flat that stops behaving like one.

You have not slept in days. It is a little after midnight in a Soviet apartment block in November, and you already know tonight will be the same. So you get up. You walk from room to room. You listen.

The kettle boils and nobody put it on. The television finds a channel that is not broadcasting. Somebody knocks and asks for sugar. The telephone rings at three in the morning and the voice on the line knows your name, and then knows where you are standing.

Deal with what the flat gives you. Keep your head. Last until six.

Then do it again, four more times.

What it is

A small first-person horror game about insomnia and a one-bedroom flat. No weapons, no inventory, no chases. You move between fixed spots, you turn, you handle things: switch off the gas, close the valve, tune the television, look through the peephole, light a match.

Everything that happens is answered with a decision, never with reflexes. There are no minigames and no quick-time events. The cost lives in the choice: to go and see, or to stay where the light is.

Your mind is the resource. It slips on its own through the night, and it slips faster every time you let something go unanswered. Sit down for a cigarette, wind the music box — the mind comes back a little. Let it run out and the night ends without you.

The further your mind falls, the more the flat holds that is not in it. Whether that is the flat or the fourth night without sleep is not a question the game answers.

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How long

Five nights, about seven minutes each. A full run is a little over half an hour. Nights get harder as they go, and the game remembers where you got to.

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Controls

The whole game is played with the mouse. One key, for the match.

Walk	Move the cursor across the floor. Where you can stand, a patch lights up. Click it.
Turn	A glow shows at the edge of the frame. Click it to turn that way.
Step back	The same glow at the very bottom of the frame — away from a thing, out of a corner, out of a room.
Handle a thing	Click it to step up to it, then click again to use it.
Turn a thing	Some things — a valve, a winder, a tuning knob — you hold and drag in a circle. It turns as far as you drag.
Match	F to strike, F again to put it out before it burns down.
Pause	Esc

Everything is in the tutorial too — How to play in the main menu. It is six pages and it is worth the two minutes.

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Languages

English and Russian. English by default; the switch is in Settings → Language, and it takes effect immediately, mid-night if you like.

Nobody in this game speaks words you can recognise. The voices are noise, and the meaning is in the subtitles — so the subtitles are the game, and both languages are the real thing rather than a patch.

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Settings

Brightness, volume, quality, windowed or full screen, language, and a line that forgets the nights you have passed.

Turn the brightness up if you cannot see. The game aims at the bottom edge of what is readable — that is deliberate — but every monitor is different and the setting exists for exactly this. Play in the dark, with headphones if you have them: half of the game is sound and where it is coming from.

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Running it

Windows — unzip and run Until Six.exe.

Linux — unzip and run Until Six.x86_64. If it will not start, mark it executable: chmod +x "Until Six.x86_64".

macOS — unzip and run Until Six.app. The build is not notarised, so macOS will refuse it the first time. Either right-click the app and choose Open, or run this once in Terminal:

xattr -cr "/path/to/Until Six.app"

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Made with

Unity 6 / HDRP. Type is PT Serif. Everything in it — the flat, the light, the voices, the noise behind the door — was built for this game.

A jam-sized thing, and finished. If it frightened you once, it did its job.