Fausts Alptraum

About Fausts Alptraum

Fausts Alptraum is a single-player puzzle game by LaboRatStudio, an indie team from Taiwan, released free on Steam in April 2017. Its story is based on Goethe's Faust.

Elisabeth Faust has just buried her father. He has left her sorrow, depression and an old house. She walks in, follows a black cat down to the basement, and darkness takes her sight. A purple demon appears, smiling as if they were old friends, and offers to show her the way out if she really wants to leave. There is one rule: if at any moment she grows nostalgic for her time there, or wishes to keep any instant forever, she loses.

You guide Elisabeth through the house and the dream around it in top-down pixel art, candlestick in hand, collecting clues and working out how her dreams relate to reality. The chapters take their names from fairy tales such as Puss in Boots, and the scenes shift between crayon scribbles, ink sketches and dark, red-lit rooms. Story moments are told with larger drawn portraits and narration.

The fear is quiet and uneasy: a bargain you do not fully understand, a house that keeps changing and a heroine who cannot tell what is real. It suits players of Ib or The Witch's House who like puzzle-led horror with a storybook feel.

How to play Fausts Alptraum

1. Download the game for free from Steam and start a new game.
2. Follow Elisabeth into her father's house and down to the basement.
3. Explore each room in top-down view and examine things to collect clues.
4. Use what you find to solve the puzzles that open the way forward.
5. Keep going through the chapters to find the way out of the nightmare.

Tips

• Examine everything; the store says the way forward depends on collecting clues.
• Pay attention to the fairy tale named in each chapter title; it sets the theme of what follows.
• Read the demon's words carefully; the rules of the bargain are part of the story.
• Move slowly through the dark rooms; much of each map is hidden until you get close with the candle.

Questions