Previously at The Space Cadets...
The Castle Has Fallen
The Castle Has Fallen was a year-long mystery experience that blurred the line between quotidian reality and dastardly fiction, playing with themes of legend, legacy, institutional transformation, and… mind control! Based at a university, the experience recruited students to pass intel through library books, post coded signals on dining hall bulletin boards, and join strangers across campus to foil a century-long conspiracy.
Investigators Unite!
One player created a documentary trailer based on her experience of the game. Join her investigation below.
Welcome to the Listserve
Your adventure begins months before you learn that there’s any adventure at all. Perhaps you’re approached by a stranger at an activities fair, perhaps you’re recruited by a friend over dinner. All you know is that you’re signing up for an e-mail list that promises to share “Fun Facts” about your university’s history.
Fun Facts!
Once a week, new anecdotes land in your inbox. You learn how a Supreme Court justice became the university mascot, why a whole campus once gathered to celebrate the death of a dog, and how students of the sixties wrangled school funding for their Orgy Club.
Something Isn’t Right Here
A few weeks in, the emails become cryptic and paranoid. They fixate obsessively on the campus castle, which has been condemned for demolition.
For the e-mailer, the castle’s fate seems inextricably linked to the university's history. Specifically, to a feud between its founders, who included Albert Einstein and a Supreme Court justice.
Google verifies that everything here is true—the planned demolition, the founders’ feud. But is there really cause for paranoia?
The Cipher
Maybe you figure it out yourself. Maybe a friend or a stranger clues you in. One way or another, you discover The Cipher: a series of coded messages that have been woven into all of the emails from the very beginning.
They've always been hiding there, in plain sight, quietly waiting for you to look closer.
Adventure, Unplugged
The messages that you decode don’t just clue you into the dark, secret history of your university’s founding. They also plead for your help. Soon, you find yourself skipping study breaks to investigate IRL.
Dead Drop
One message leads you to the library’s basement. There, deep in the darkest, dustiest stacks, you discover a book that doubles as a dead drop for trading secret memos.
Cloak & Dagger
Another message proposes that you meet with a shadowy informant. They'll be waiting, tomorrow, at midnight, somewhere in the woods behind campus.
Your Secret Society
A coded flyer on the dining hall bulletin board turns out not to be from the newsletter’s author at all; it’s from a group of students who are on the same journey that you’re on. They want you to join their investigation team. You in?
Legends, Lies, and Legacies
Together, you and your fellow investigators piece together an impossible story, uniting true secrets of your university (the boarded-up tunnels under the castle, the NASA laboratory under the philosophy building, the mysterious plane crash at the center of campus) with an impossible tale of mind control, espionage, and academic vendettas.
Can you and your new friends save the castle, with its treasure trove of evidence?
Or will the administration go through with its planned demolition?
The Castle Has Fallen
In the summer of 2017, eighty-nine years after it first appeared on Boston Rock, the Usen Castle is demolished. Scrawled across the newsletter's ciphers, fellow investigators’ bulletins, and coded messages scattered across campus, you discover a conspiratorial lament: The Castle Has Fallen.
Your mission to save the castle failed. You and your friends are the last in a century-long tradition of students who wondered at the magic of its architectural mysteries.
Meanwhile, the villains are still out there, waiting to return in The Space Cadets' spin-off experience, What Happened to Becky Acorn.
More From The Space Cadets
If you’re intrigued by the collision of mystery, architecture, and conspiracy, then you’ll love Murder Gently—the mansion mystery storytelling game.