a penny for my thoughts

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Game Description

The Orphic Institute for Advanced Studies

Bringing Truth Out of Darkness

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A mind-bending game about memory. Come play in the midnight hours and see how twisty things can get!

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The Orphic Institute for Advanced Studies is a private research hospital dedicated to the treatment of disorders that traditional medicine has deemed incurable. Recently, you suffered a traumatic shock that caused a rare form of memory loss called profound retrograde amnesia. You have no conscious recollection of your life prior to this event. We at the institute believe that this trauma was caused by some action on your part, and your mind has created a barrier as a way of protecting you. On an unconscious level, your own mind is unwilling to let itself heal. Enter Mnemosyne: Mnemosyne is an experimental pharmaceutical drug that creates a connection between the unconscious minds of those who take it.

We (that is, you and the medical team) decided that Mnemosyne was the only viable option to regain some sense of yourself. The chemical allows someone else access to your memories. To take advantage of this, the instituted developed a treatment in which patients with your condition help each other recover your memories.

While Mnemosyne helps to break down the barriers between your mind and the minds of your fellow patients, it also weakens the barriers between the compartments of your mind. Memories, dreams, books, movies, all of these may mix together. To help you distinguish fact from fiction, we have prepared this guide to the world you live in. You may treat the following statements about the world as true:

• It is the twenty-first century. Technology—cars, planes, computer networks, mobile phones, etc.—has not advanced beyond your hazy familiarity with it, nor has humanity been thrown into a new dark age.

• The world is a mundane place. Its wonders and terrors come from simple and personal things, like the birth of a child or the death of a loved one. Rest assured that you are not haunted by spirits, nor are you tormented by aliens.

• You are a normal, everyday person. This isn’t to say that you might not be a remarkable individual, but feats like leaping across rooftops or reading people’s minds are simply impossible. You are not an action hero, nor are you a Greek god.

• Your condition was caused by physiological or psychological trauma surrounding events in your personal life. It was not caused by a shadowy government conspiracy or similar organization.

We hope that this will aid you in recovering your identity. Please know that we are monitoring your progress throughout the treatment; though, for reasons already explained, we cannot intervene during it. Should you accidentally recall false memories, we will collect you once the process is complete and attempt your treatment again with a new therapy group. Our goal is to help you remember how to be the functional member of society you once were.