Papers, Please creator just released a new free LCD-style Halloween game

Lucas Pope, designer of Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, just released a free game on Halloween via his itch.io page. It’s called Moida Mansion, and you can play it in a browser as many times as you wish — and you might have to play it several times if you want to rescue all of your friends from the titular mansion.

Pope has designed Moida Mansion in the style of an LCD handheld game, complete with a nonexistent handheld device with pressable buttons to control the game. It’s got the look of the old handheld Tiger Electronics games I played as a kid, but it has way more going on under the hood. The game comes with a digital instruction manual describing how to play, which you’ll need because not all of it is intuitive. The instructions end with this tantalizing tidbit: “Moida Mansion is constantly changing. Each time you play it will have different rooms with different puzzles! Can you rescue your friends and get out alive? PS: What about Dot?”

Traversing the mansion involves clicking through each 2D room using the two big buttons at the bottom of the fake handheld device, or climbing/descending stairs with the stair button (on the top left). You’ll need these movement buttons when you inevitably run into the “monsta,” a shadowy figure that will instantly trigger a game-over screen if it reaches you. But it doesn’t move that fast; you can definitely get away if you stay alert and ready to move.

The hard part is that you’ll also need to use the top-right button with the magnifying glass next to it to search the contents of each room, trying to find your friends, who are hiding from the monsta in various spots around the mansion. Clicking the search button just once per room won’t do the trick, either. You’ll need to click it multiple times to cycle through each object in the room, searching each one, all before the monsta catches up to you. There are more secrets to discover beyond that basic premise, but that’ll get you started.

Moida Mansion is just the right amount of challenge, and the sound effects are the perfect throwback to the LCD handheld era. It may be Nov. 1 and not Halloween anymore, but it’s never too late (or too early) to celebrate the holiday.