Beware minor spoilers for Chairbound in this piece. I think they’re minor. I have no idea what’s truly significant in this dreary purgatory of flourescent lights and rippled glass facades. Only one thing seems guaranteed: I have to get out of here in 10 minutes or I’m doomed.
I met the weird little girl again. She was loitering in the shadow of a pillar on the eighth floor. I found her goblin-esque during our first meeting, but up close she seems relatively ordinary, a pale 10-year-old in a nightie with shoulder-length hair. At least, until she burbles distorted sounds at me and runs away into the darkness. I gather she is looking for her “toy”. I don’t think it’s the rubber duck I’m holding.
Some other observations about the eighth floor: there are more rubber ducks down here. This is handy intelligence indeed, because it means I don’t have to grab the one in the starting office above, saving me 30-60 seconds of abject swivelling and fumbling. I’m still not clear why I would need this rubber duck. It seems perfectly useless. But I don’t know for sure that I don’t need it, and squeaking the thing pathetically lifts my mood somewhat as I trundle through the office’s neat and tidy desolation.
Another thing I’ve learned: the thing strapped to my chest isn’t explosive. When the timer runs down, the display clicks “on”, and there’s a hiss of initially harmless gas. The first time this happened, I almost died of relief. I figured the timer must have been a prank, a red herring of some kind. Ten minutes to make it down nine stories while tied to a rolling office chair? Of course they were joking. But then my surroundings wobbled and blurred and the shadows took me.
I feel like there must, must be a way to disable this gadget, or extend the timer, because even when I’m being efficient, it takes a good few minutes to descend a single floor. It occurs to me that I dropped the duck on my last attempt, shortly before the gas overwhelmed my senses. Perhaps the duck offers protection from the gas. A voice repeats in my stomach: the duck is the key.
Final observations: I managed to get into some kind of computer room on the eighth floor, just below one of the red lights. It contained a stack of displays and another chair, standing in a pool of what I’m pretty sure is blood. This Bodes, for sure. I don’t fancy my chances at fighting anybody or anything off while I’m strapped to this chair. Let’s reconvene to compare notes on the seventh floor, assuming I make it.
Find Chairbound on Steam.
