A Bit of Light (But Creepy) Entertainment

I don't often link to videogames around here, although they're in plentiful supply on the Internet, but I've come across one that might be worth some of your idle time (assuming you have some): DayMare Town. It's a puzzle, in essence, and the atmosphere is of a hand-drawn Poe sketch (perhaps best experienced at night).

The genre is "point-and-click," which means that you play the game by clicking things on the screen — sometimes obvious and sometimes requiring you to just move your mouse around until you happen over a hotspot — to do things, to collect items (which you can sometimes combine), to use the items, and so on. Keep an eye out, especially with the pencil sketch illustrations, because it isn't always obvious that a particular squiggle is something more than a squiggle.

If, like me, your idle time amounts to minutes rather than hours, you can find a walkthrough of the solution here. I will tell you this beforehand, though: the goals are to (1) find all the birds so that you can free a prisoner and (2) find and use all of the puzzle pieces to operate a machine that will enable you to escape the town (which somehow made me think of the Artful Dodger and Fagin at the end of the musical version of Oliver Twist). And don't be afraid to retrace your steps, because as you go along, things may appear where they weren't (although it might save you some time to know that the things that thus appear are more obvious than the average item).