Rust River is our first-party industrial-horror ARG: a lab report showing groundwater 127 times the national standard leads journalist Ye Shen into a south-western smelter town with 47 disappearances over twenty years. 9 acts, 18 puzzles, 20 simulated websites, 24 collectible clues, 4 endings, 8–12 hours. Contains horror content and sudden audio.
April 2026. Investigative journalist Ye Shen receives an anonymous email with one attachment: a lab report showing groundwater heavy metals 127 times the national standard in a small town in south-west China. She arrives with a recorder and a 1960s survey map. 9 acts, 18 puzzles, 20 simulated websites (48 pages), 24 collectible clues, 44 emails, 4 endings, an 8-page missing-workers ledger (47 people), 8–12 hours.
April 2026. Journalist Ye Shen receives an anonymous email: no signature, one attachment — a PDF test report showing groundwater heavy metal levels 127 times the national standard in a small south-western town. At the bottom, a handwritten scan: “The water in Rust River is tainted. So are the people. Coming?”
Four days later she boards the long-distance bus with the email, a voice recorder and a 1960s geological survey map photocopied from the provincial library. What she does not know: she is not the first investigator here. The ones who came before never left.
It is played as a pseudo-interface investigation: the game is a browser and you hop between twenty simulated websites — the guesthouse, the Rust River forum, the daily paper, the township clinic, the environmental bureau, Xinyuan Smelting, the library, the middle school, the town government, the labour office, the agricultural market board, a geologist's notes, the police post, abandoned mine records, social snapshots, a lab, geological archives, a dark-web entry, deep files and the final site — 48 pages in all.
The horror works on two levels. One is a straight pollution investigation: exceedance factors, deleted case files, forty-seven people who “disappeared” rather than left over twenty years. The other is what those records point at once assembled: a cavity breached by drilling in 1999 that releases a pulse every seven years on a 222-year cycle.
Before you enter the town there is a checkbox you must tick, and the warning is the game's own: it contains horror, thriller and psychological pressure, with sudden sounds, flicker and jump cuts; it advises against play for people with photosensitive epilepsy or lower tolerance, and says to close the page immediately if you feel unwell.
This page will not soften that sentence. It is a different game from Unclaimed or Last Online: those are warm and quietly tense; this one has jump cuts and sudden audio, and its subject matter includes pollution illness and disappearance.
It is also entirely fictional. The landing and trust pages state that all people, places, institutions and events are invented — nothing here should be read as real information, and none of it should be imitated.
The four are decided by the choice in puzzle 15, and two also depend on how many clues you collected; exact triggers are in the walkthrough.
With all eight ledger pages, every ending gains a final page headed “the last page of the ledger.” It changes no branch; it is their shared coda.
The labour bureau’s directed-training contracts gave only forty-seven numbers, start dates and the word “missing.” These eight pages turn them back into people: names, jobs, last days, and what eight of them left behind.
The ledger unseals with the acts, one page per act. The fourth row on the first page is Ye Changlin — Ye Shen’s father. The game does not say so; it only leaves his line at the bottom: “Tell Shenshen I’m working late tonight.”
The entrance is at the top of the evidence panel. All eight pages are guaranteed before the final chapter; with the full set, every ending gains a page called “the last page of the ledger”: forty-seven names in number order, and one blank line at the end.
The ledger gives no puzzle answers. It fills in what these forty-seven people did, loved and promised before they became “missing persons.”
The eight object photographs are AI-generated illustrations used to fill in the objects, not screenshots of the game.
It is the longest game here: 8–12 hours, twenty sites, 48 pages, 24 collectible clues, 44 emails. It is not built to frighten you in one sitting but to let you finish a fictional town's records the way real reporting ends.
It turns investigative-journalism form into mechanics: exceedance factors, edited case files, a budget line that is not in the budget, the difference between shaft rosters and the surface list. Those are the reporter's tools and the puzzle material at once.
The four endings are genuinely different postures: publish, go alone, go with a beacon, or hand the question back to the town. The true ending is not a victory — it is a whole town listening once.
If you play one of our ARGs, this is the biggest. If sudden audio and jump cuts are a line you do not cross, read the content warning section first.
Rust River is inland and south-western, on the same map as the coastal Lan City (The Sunken City, Tide Sound Archives) and the hillside asylum of Eye of the Abyss.
Act 8 ties the 222-year cycle to several locations at once; that shared mechanism, not a cameo, is how the games connect.
No required order. Play this first and the others show the same cycle behaving differently elsewhere.
Nine acts come from acts.js, eighteen puzzles from puzzles.js, twenty sites from locations.js and 48 pages from the summed entries of the pages-*.js files; 44 emails from emails.js and four endings from endings.js.
Twenty-four is the denominator the evidence bar itself uses (the size of the collectible clue set in App.vue), not the row count of the clue data file, which holds 76 entries of which some are not collectible. The 8–12 hours is the game's own stated playtime.
The ledger’s eight pages, forty-seven names and start dates come from ledger.js; the build gate checks the numbers run 01–47 without gaps, that each page’s focus person is in that page’s roster, that all eight images exist, and runs negative controls.
Both screenshots were taken from the running game on 2026-10-19. The hero image is an AI-generated illustration, not a game screenshot, labelled at the top of the page. If a number here disagrees with the game, the game is right; tell us in the changelog.
For players happy to spend several evenings through a fictional industrial town's public record and to accept horror atmosphere and sudden audio; also for anyone interested in investigation-shaped puzzles.
Not for players wanting something short and sharp, nor for those who will not tolerate jump cuts and psychological pressure; people with photosensitive epilepsy should not play.
Do I need an account or payment?
No. It runs in the browser, free, with no account or in-app purchases.
Is there horror content?
Yes. The landing warning states horror, thriller and psychological pressure with sudden sounds, flicker and jump cuts; you must tick it to enter.
How long is it?
About 8–12 hours; seeing all four endings takes longer, and two depend on clue count.
Where is progress saved?
Locally in the browser. Refresh or close and continue; it does not sync across devices, and clearing site data restarts.
What if I am stuck?
Check the evidence bar and keyword chips, then search again; every answer is in the body text of an unlocked site — no outside sources needed.
Can I switch to English?
Yes; the interface and the site content have English versions.
Can I miss the missing-workers ledger?
No. It unseals one page per act and is complete before the final chapter; the full set adds a “last page” after every ending.
Is this a true story?
No. It is an entirely fictional interactive game; the people, places, institutions and events are invented and should not be read as real information.
Start investigation — Runs on its own subdomain · progress saved locally · contains horror content and sudden audio