Play this game ↗ · About this game · By alphaBETA DEV · Published 2026-10-12 · Updated 2026-10-30 · Editorial standards · Changelog

Unclaimed: Complete Walkthrough — All 12 Missing Words, the Locker Tally and Every Ending

Spoiler warning: This article lists the missing word for all 12 records, the three-segment answers to the locker query, and the trigger conditions for every ending. Almost all the pleasure of this game lives in that first moment of "coming up with the word yourself," so if you have not yet cleared item 5, I suggest reading only Section 2 (the system rules) and saving the derivations for when you get stuck.

On this article's credibility: Unclaimed is a game we made ourselves. Every missing word, every accepted spelling and every numeric threshold below comes from screens the player actually sees — the boot self-test, each record's file, the side indexes, the locker query panel and the end-of-shift screen — and was checked line by line in live play on the published build (https://unclaimed.gamestrategists.com/). The screenshots are all real gameplay.

1. What this game does, and what it does not

Chengnan East Station stopped handling intercity passenger service on 14 July 2019, and the lost property office was left with a single 1996 query terminal, unattended. You walk in with the key your grandfather left you — three segments of its tally tag have been worn smooth, and only the middle 0714 is still legible. The terminal's power-on self-test reports a holding of 4,118 records, 13 of them with a missing field.

There is only one thing you do: work out the word that is missing, and type it into the search box.

It is worth saying up front what this is not: there is no simulated website to browse, no password box, no clue board, no jump scares and no countdown. The whole interface is one phosphor-green screen plus a search box. It is closer to "reading a single person's 41 years of duty records on one old terminal" than to a traditional point-and-click puzzle game where you wander around hunting for keys.

Your default signature is Cheng Nian (the English interface shows Cheng Nian) — the title page never asks for your name; it simply keeps this default.

2. Six system rules you must know before you start

These six decide whether you misjudge "is it broken?" in the first ten minutes.

1. It accepts only one query term at a time. The first line of the HELP panel spells this out bluntly. Spaces, logical AND and quotation marks are all unsupported.

2. The number of □ is the length of the answer. Chinese counts by character, so □□□ is three characters; English counts by word, so □□□□ □□□ □□□□ is three words. On your first miss the system also tells you plainly, "the missing field occupies N cells."

3. Hit detection is deliberately lenient and will never trap you on a glyph. The search box normalises what you type before testing it: it lowercases everything; turns Chinese and English punctuation, brackets, slashes, hyphens and underscores into spaces; strips all spaces from Chinese input and squeezes runs of spaces in English input into one. On top of that there are two more relaxations: Chinese tolerates a difference in the trailing particles de / le / guo (roughly "of", "have" and "ever"), and English tolerates a trailing plural s. So all of these count as correct:

• 等雨停了, 等 雨 停, 等雨停。 (Chinese-interface forms)
• Spider Web, spiderwebs, a web

Every word has its own accepted-spelling list (usually 4–7 forms), and the quick-reference table below lists them in full.

4. Consecutive misses degrade to hints, but the third one starts being logged. 1st miss: similar results from the same class plus how many cells the missing field occupies; 2nd miss: the record's more specific hint (one line of direction, one more specific clue); 3rd miss and beyond: the plain-text "field-completion note" is unlocked, and the clerk log records "assistance ×1". Asking for help has no bearing on whether you can clear the game — it affects one enclosure only; see Section 8.

5. Clicking an index and getting nothing back is normal. The four secondary indexes on the right mount in batches as you progress; before a batch has mounted, clicking returns "index not mounted." This is not hidden and not a bug. Mount timing is in Section 5.

6. Progress is saved automatically on your own machine. Close the page and come back, and you can carry on with this shift. To start over, click "Restart"; it wipes the local save and starts the shift over.

3. The seven acts in order, and the twelve records

At the start only two records are on the shelf, all four index groups read "not mounted," and "Locker query" is greyed out — that is the entire visible information of Act 0; there is nowhere else to click.

An act is not "chapter selection" — it is processing progress. Each act states which records must be completed; only when they are all in does it print that act's receipt and possibly mount new indexes. Item 4 (the letter) requires item 3 (the watch) to be done first, and item 12 (the register) requires item 11 (the key) first — these are the only two hard prerequisites in the whole game.

Quick-reference table

In the Chinese interface these same twelve records answer to 等雨停 / 爸爸 / 蜘蛛网 / 空白 / 调音记录 / 雪 / 新 / 戴 / 九年 / 名字 / 没丢 / 交给她 (the same lenient matching rules apply).

There are also 8 notes tucked between the pages of the register; searching the matching word drops one out, and collecting all eight adds an "Appendix · Eight Notes" segment to the ending page.

Item-by-item derivation

The answer itself is cheap; what is worth something is knowing "this word could only have come from here." Each item below gives its source clue — where to look on a replay.

Item 1 · Umbrella → wait out rain. This is the one place in the game where the system hands you the answer outright. Of the three relics on the duty screen, the note unfolded from the coat's inner pocket is in your grandfather's hand: "Wait out rain. I left the umbrella on Platform Ⅲ. On the 14th of July I couldn't bring myself to take it home." Without this step, Act 0 would be a pure guessing game. The third stroke of the carving on the umbrella handle hooks back on itself, which tells you the carver's left middle finger was injured and he switched to pushing the blade with his right hand — a detail that appears again on item 10 (the start point of the file marks on the badge).

Item 2 · Season-ticket stub → father. The back reads "For Junjun — don't tell his □□□□□□." The ticket face reads "Chengnan East · CD · 1 adult / 1 child," and the attached photo shows a woman holding a boy, her face outside the frame, the boy about three years old. The annotation is "I didn't hand it over. His mother was still at the window, buying tickets." — the mother is present, so what the child was told not to say is his father. This item also yields the station code CD (Chengnan), the earliest source of the first segment of the locker query.

Item 3 · Children's digital watch → spiderweb. "Face cracked like a □□□□□□□□□," one word, "a thing that appears on glass, and in the corners of ceilings," radiating from a single centre point. This is the game's first record where the status and the visitor book disagree: status CLAIMED, claimed 2021-06-14, claimed by Zhou Junjun (18), yet June of that year has no recorded visit to the lost property office. The system log adds one line: the receipt printed, but the carbon copy was never collected — it is jammed in the print head.

Item 4 · Unsent letter → blank. The "From" field is □□□□□, one word, "what a pen leaves behind when it stops on a half-filled page"; the letter runs 12 lines and simply stops after the last one, with no ink in the signature block. This record only appears on the shelf after item 3 is done. The full text of the letter is the emotional midpoint of the whole game — "A thing reaching its owner is not the same as a letter arriving."

Item 5 · Crate of string instruments → tuning log. The paper in the case sleeve has four lines: G 196.0 / D 293.7 / A 440.0 / C 261.6, the last line empty. Four string names matched to frequencies, done before the curtain rises, something the audience would never know about — it can only be a tuning log. The blank last line is the C string, i.e. that cello nobody came for, whose bow is not even in the crate. This item gives the rack letter B.

Item 6 · Concert programme → heavy snow. The Chinese box holds a single character (two words in English). The "Cancelled because of" field contains a weather word, yet the meteorological check says the city averages 0.2 snow days in December and recorded no snow on 2011-12-19. After the field is completed, the system appends the truth: the parcels room was without power all day, track maintenance. He Shuyi's oral note explains why they insisted on snow — "Write that and it looks like the station owed them an apology."

Item 7 · Spectacles → newly ground. The Chinese answer is a single character (two words in English), the opposite of "original." The optician's slip specifies a new lens for the right eye only; the left keeps its original lens, surface damage grade 4, with the optician's note: "She said she wanted to keep remembering things the way they were, out of her left eye." The status here is RETURNED: collected by the owner on 2003-05-11, then on 05-13 the same person brought the same spectacles back to the lost property office and asked that they be logged as lost property.

Item 8 · Hearing aid → worn. The Chinese answer is a single character (one word in English), "one action would have been enough for it to fulfil its purpose." Battery 100%, switch at ON, ear mould untrimmed (trimming has to be fitted against a living ear), and no cerumen or skin oil anywhere on the body. The purchase receipt is dated 2016-06-30, purchased by Cheng Fu'an, with the "Wearer" field filled in as "Shouying"; the cross-reference points to Li Shouying (1941–2016), who died on 14 July 2016 — the device was collected 14 days before she died. Completing this item is what actually puts the middle segment of the locker number in your hands.

Item 9 · Plants of the Chengnan Platform → nine years. Two words, the first of them a number. The first entry is 1994-09 and the last is 2009-11, with nine marginalia written in relay. Entry 8 (He Shuyi) has already given the answer away: "Year seven the platform was rebuilt. Year eight the rebuilding finished. Year nine nobody rebuilt anything further." Note that this item carries an extra gate; see Section 4.

Item 10 · School badge → his name. Two words, "what gets scratched on the back of a private thing so it can find its way home after being lost." The name on the reverse has been deliberately filed away, leaving only the left half of the last character, which reads "jun." The file marks slope and the cut starts at the left — the blade was held in the left hand. Anomalous field: CLAIMED on 2021-06-14, then manually rolled back to UNCLAIMED, by Zhou Junjun; in the duty record his own words are "Don't give me this one. It's still waiting for someone. It isn't necessarily me."

Item 11 · A brass key → not lost. Two words, "a phrase a clerk is permitted himself only four times in a lifetime." After completion the system explains: of the 45 volumes of the Register, only 3 records had their "logged category" overwritten with a non-standard value — the umbrella, the hearing aid, and this one. The common thread across the four records sharing this category is that the person who logged it is the person who found it, and the thing never moved. The tally amendment history lays down the whole case: PLATE ORIGINAL 2000-04-09 → CD-2000-Ⅲ-B (to specification), PLATE AMENDED 2016-07-15 → CD-0714-Ⅲ-B (altered by hand; same clerk). Li Shouying died on 14 July; the next day he went to the station and filed the year off the tally, cutting her date in its place. This is the only time in the whole game that the system asks you a Y/N, and it is exactly the Ending A / B fork.

Item 12 · Register, volume 45 → give it to her. Three words. Volume 43's last page reads "still waiting."; volume 44's reads "I was keeping it for her." — these are the exact wording of the annotations on item 1 and item 11 respectively — and volume 45's last page reads "give it to her." These three-word last pages were not written to a lost-and-found owner; they were written to whoever opens the register next. Completing this record unlocks the locker query permission.

4. Item 9 is the game's only two-channel puzzle

The missing word for Plants of the Chengnan Platform is "nine years," but typing "nine years" straight into the box will not pass; the terminal returns:

Several hits. Narrow the range first using the "Category" index.

This record carries an extra condition: you must first select Books in the "Category" index on the right, and only then does the same query term take effect. The right word but the range not narrowed — the system will not let it through. This is the one and only time in the game you are required to use two channels at once.

The ordering never blocks you: the Category index mounts after two acts are cleared (see Section 5), while item 9 belongs to Act 5, so it has long been available by then. When people do get stuck here, it is usually the reverse — forgetting that the right-hand side is clickable at all.

5. When the four indexes mount

The four index groups on the right are driven by "the number of acts fully cleared" — an act is cleared only once every record it requires has been completed — not by how many items you have completed.

By Act 5 all four index groups are available. The "Index access" page in the HELP panel deliberately puts it in the voice of a 1996 manual: mounting depends on this office's processing backlog, not on the reader's actions — meaning it is not that you missed a click.

6. What 0714 is, and why you should not type it into the search box

0714 is the only four digits left un-worn on the key's tally tag, and it is the most easily misused string in the whole case.

Type 0714 into the search box and you will not get a clue — you will get an aborted receipt:

The four digits following a station code should be a year. 0714 is not a year. Search aborted.

Try instead: category = Keys ∧ clerk = Cheng Fu'an ∧ year = 2000

The system courteously offers an alternative route, but there is a cost not shown on screen: this input is recorded as one miss against item 11 (the key). Three consecutive misses trigger the third-tier degradation and log "assistance ×1" in the clerk log — and the enclosure's condition is precisely that you never asked for help once. So if you mean to keep the enclosure, do not try 0714 in the search box.

It really has two uses, both on the locker-query side: it is the middle segment of the locker number (CD-0714-Ⅲ-B), and the system's attitude toward it is itself the story — in 2000, when he logged it, he wrote the number properly as CD-2000-Ⅲ-B; on 15 July 2016 he filed the year into her date by hand, and the system never approved the amendment. That is why a search aborts and why opening the locker asks you once more.

As an aside: searching CD directly does work. It hits item 2's ordinary index entry — the station code is read from this very source.

7. The locker query: how to fill the three segments

Once item 12 is complete, the "Locker query" button on the right lights up from grey (before it is unlocked, the button simply reads "permission not unlocked," so there is nothing to guess). The panel has three input boxes, each limited to 4 characters; the middle four digits, 0714, are already in place and you do not need to type them.

That Roman-numeral segment was given a long list of alternative spellings on purpose; the comment in the source says it plainly: otherwise the finale would become an input-method trap — most keyboards cannot type Ⅲ, so 3 and iii both count.

Fill the three segments correctly and click "Open locker"; the system confirms first, then stops you once more:

CD-0714-Ⅲ-B: code ✓ zone ✓ rack ✓

Check: 0714 does not conform to this station's numbering rules (the four digits after a station code should be a year).

This tally was amended by hand by the clerk. Open the locker regardless?

Only choosing "Yes · open" actually opens the locker. If any one segment is wrong, it tells you segment by segment whether the failure is the code, the zone or the rack; it will not just report "check failed."

The full text of the true ending is read inside the locker panel, not on the end-of-shift screen. After opening the locker you see one item held in the locker (deposited 2000-04-09 03:40, depositor Cheng Fu'an, collection deadline: none): ① an unused return ticket dated 2000-04-09 04:10, Chengnan East → City First Hospital; ② Register volumes 1–44, physical location "the Cheng family flat, west wall of the living room, second shelf"; ③ a 41-second recording. Those 41 seconds have no audio file — the system printed them line by line as subtitles. This is a clever piece of design in the game: it is wired to no external audio at all (the "Sound" page in HELP states outright that the machine makes only three mechanical sounds), so the only way to "listen" to that recording is to read it.

8. The real ending structure: two pen-strokes, one tail, one enclosure

The official copy says "three endings," but the text you actually read runs to four segments, and they are not three parallel branches. Getting this straight saves you a restart.

There is only one fork: that single Y/N on item 11 (the key). After the key is completed, the system asks "Update this record to CLAIMED? [Y/N]" — this is the one and only time in the whole game you personally answer whether something is claimed:

• answer Yes → Ending A · Everything Claimed ([ ALL ITEMS CLAIMED ])
• answer No → Ending B · One Left Waiting ([ 1 STILL WAITING ])

The real closing story lives inside the locker, not on the A/B fork. When you open the locker, the locker panel shows the heading "True Ending · The Locker" together with the 41-second recording's subtitles; the end-of-shift screen also gains one extra line — "The locker has been opened. That 41-second recording has no audio file — the system printed it out line by line, and the paper is still on the printer" — and the status on the CD-0714-Ⅲ-B row of the claim list changes from "Unclaimed" to "Delivered." You still have to sign off on one of A or B.

The enclosure turns on whether you ever asked for help. Its condition is strict to a single thing: you never once drove a record to a third miss, i.e. "assistance ×1" was never logged in the clerk log. When it is met, the end screen gains an extra sheet, "Enclosure · Blank Receipt" ([ 1996 · UNUSED STOCK ]).

So a single playthrough can show up to four blocks on the end screen at once: A or B (the main ending) plus the one-line locker note plus the blank enclosure plus the eight-notes appendix (if you collected all eight notes). The full "True Ending" text, however, is read in the locker panel when you open it. Of these, only A versus B is genuinely your choice.

Signing off is gated. The "End shift" button becomes live only once all 12 records are completed and the Y/N on item 11 has been answered. Clicking it early yields just a nudge:

Records remain incomplete. The system will not sign for you.

Or: Outstanding: one record still awaits your yes or no.

The game does not record which endings you have seen. The end screen offers only "download the 13-item claim list" and "Restart"; there is no ending collection. To gather both A and B you have to restart once — and a restart clears the local save, including the 12 records you already completed. So think through which branch you want before you press that button on item 11.

9. Stuck? Check by symptom

10. "13 items" and "12/12" are not a contradiction

The power-on self-test says "13 records with a missing field," the ending copy says "thirteen items, thirteen receipts," and the progress bar in the top-right always reads Completed N/12. This is not a display error:

• The search box can complete 12 records — the 12 on-shelf items listed under "Holdings on shelf". That is why the progress bar always reads N/12.
• The 13th item is the contents of CD-0714-Ⅲ-B, which is not in the search index and can only be reached through the locker query. So on the end screen's claim list it occupies its own row, its status depending on whether you opened the locker (Delivered / Unclaimed).

Hence: when the progress bar reads 12/12, everything is cleared — there is no "one more I haven't found." That final CD-0714-Ⅲ-B row at the end of the list is the 13th item.

11. Two closing words on the design

Unclaimed is our first game to carry no horror element at all, and our first to compress the entire interaction into a single input box. It is betting on something else: if the player has only one tool, then the story itself has to carry all of the forward motion. So the "annotation" field of every file is written in the voice of the clerk Cheng Fu'an, and 41 years of duty records come down, in the end, to a single line: things wait on behalf of people.

The three relics (the key, the note, and that 6-second call at 2026-09-02 03:40) are the only "readable at the start" text in the whole game, and the note carries a very practical function: it puts item 1's answer directly into the player's hands. Without it, Act 0 would be word-guessing and players would churn within thirty seconds. This kind of threshold design is common in content guides, but writing it into in-game physical evidence rather than a tutorial pop-up is something we are quite pleased with.

If you came here from Room 404 or Midnight Frequency: this title is a standalone world; it takes part in no cross-title narrative. It exchanges no clues, characters or locations with the "Linyuan Archive" group (Midnight Frequency, Tide Sound Archives, Room 404, Last Online, Night Shift Rules). Nor does it belong to the "Xinyuan Smelter" group, which stops at Rust River. You do not need to have played anything else to understand it. The reverse holds too — any "hidden crossover" you did not find here will not be found in the other six titles either, and this site's game universe page says so plainly.

May you read, across those 12 records, the person who left no name behind.

Changelog

• 2026-10-30: Corrected the wording in the section about connections to other titles. It used to say the Xinyuan Smelter group covered both Rust River and Eye of the Abyss; in a later rewrite Eye of the Abyss renamed its own smelter and has not mentioned that company since, so Xinyuan Smelter now refers to Rust River alone. The conclusion that this title stands on its own is unchanged, and nothing else on the page was edited.

• 2026-10-12: First published. All 12 missing words and their accepted spellings, the mount thresholds of the four index groups, item 9's two-channel lock, the hidden cost that 0714 is logged as one miss against item 11, the alternative spellings for the three locker-query segments, and the ruling that "Ending A/B is decided by one Y/N on item 11, the true ending is a tail, and the enclosure requires zero help throughout" were each checked line by line against the live build in actual play. The 5 screenshots are real gameplay; the two endgame shots (locker query, claim list) were taken from a save in which all 12 records were completed, noted here for clarity.