Willowmere: Merge Mystery

Your great-aunt Edith has left you Willowmere Lodge. It has stood shut since the summer of 1998, the night Edith drowned at the end of the dock. Edith never swam. The roof leaks, the rooms are full of junk, and the people who were there that night still live by the lake.

Willowmere is a merge puzzle with a cold case at its heart. Click the old mail case, the tea basket and the steamer trunk to fill the board, drag two of a kind together to make something better, and fill the orders of the cook, the boatman, the painter and the inspector who wrote "accident". Every order pays stars, and every star brings a piece of the lodge back to life.

How it plays

• Merge envelopes into love letters, teacups into teapots, keys into locks and old film into a projector
• Free the junk under the cobwebs by merging a match into it
• Fill orders to earn stars, then spend them to restore the lodge one piece at a time: the mantel clock, the piano, the canoe, the attic filing cabinet
• Every fifth restoration, someone remembers more about that night. At the end of each room, three of them tell you their story, and one of them is lying

What's inside

• 120 restorations over six rooms: the Lounge, the Kitchen, the Guest Wing, the Boathouse, the Attic and the Dock
• A written mystery in 24 chapters with six "who's lying?" puzzles
• Ten merge chains and five generators, from love letters to the mantelpiece clock
• Cobwebbed junk to free, bubbles to keep, lightning and coins to collect
• A daily delivery: the same fresh board for everyone, with 40 energy and four orders
• Six board styles to unlock with coins; energy comes back on its own while you are away
• English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Plays offline, no account

Controls (PC)

• Mouse: click a box to make things; drag two of the same together; click a ready order to deliver; Restore; click an item, then Sell.
• Enter: takes a story card's button, starts and resumes. Esc: pause / back; on the title it asks before quitting.

The itch.io version

• No ads. No in-app purchases. The full game, once.
• Recharge every box (2-minute cooldown), Keep a bubble (30 seconds) and one extra 15 energy in the daily delivery are free. Energy comes back on its own, one a minute.
• Double coins is gone, so coins stay at their earned rate.
• A 540x960 portrait window that can be resized.

Linux requires libcurl.so.4 in addition to a working graphics driver.

All characters and events are fictional.

Credits

Fluent Emoji by Microsoft (MIT). Music: "Carefree" and "Floating Cities" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0. Fonts: Playfair Display, Nunito (SIL OFL 1.1). Made with Godot (MIT). Crash reports by Sentry (MIT).