Dead Man's Cursor

HIS CURSOR STILL MOVES.

Elliot Marsh is dead at his desk. The paramedics say heart failure. You'd sign off on that too, except his computer was never shut down, and some of his files moved after his heart stopped.

The Dead Man's Cursor is a browser-based mystery about reconstructing a death from the inside of a machine. On one side of your screen: a forensic mirror of the victim's desktop, frozen at 22:00, the moment he was found. A timeline scrubber lets you rewind it through his final hour, minute by minute, and watch what changes. A deleted message. A rewritten document. A password typed into the wrong field by shaking hands. On the other side: your own workstation, a case file, a corkboard where you pin evidence and tie it together with string, and a line open to four people who all had a reason to want him gone.

And then there's the cursor. It moves on its own, drifting across the frozen desktop like something is still using it. That's not a plot device you get told about. It's a mystery inside the mystery, and finding the real explanation is part of the score.

What you'll do:

- Scrub a full hour of a dead man's computer, catching what got deleted, renamed, or rewritten after the fact

- Pin evidence to a corkboard and connect it with string to build your case

- Question four suspects, each with something to hide

- Name a killer, a motive, and cite your proof; you only get one shot

- Get graded on deduction accuracy, evidence found, and whether you ever figured out the cursor

Every playthrough seeds a different killer from four suspect templates, so the guilty party, the evidence trail, and the lies change on replay. No installs, no accounts, no ads, just open it and start the case.

Built solo for a game jam on the theme of death, in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Every sound is synthesized in your browser. Every icon is drawn, not downloaded.