Knowing what you know now, do you still think this is a good hint to add? (How would it have helped you?)
The game is quite merciful; at least until that point, there is hardly any moment that you can get locked out of finishing it.
However, at that point, I didn’t know. When the guard brought my stuff in, I thought I hadn’t done something properly and I should go back and re-try. This is of course before the great aha moment. The fact that the retrieved items are not exactly what the player expects is core to the revelation of what is going on.
This is the only reason I am suggesting some subtle suggestion that the items on the interrogator’s table are actually not a product of the player’s error, but a prompt to rethink the whole game’s point of view.
But perhaps it is redundant. That’s my opinion as a fairly inexperienced player.
Interesting! I added a point #14 to “how do I escape.”
The missing items are supposed to be missing. That’s part of your plan.
Do you think that would help? (Enough?)
I just saw the hints you have from (4) on (under: How do I escape the interrogation chair?) They are super. I just never got to read them, because I didn’t want to spoil the fun of The Puzzle! The big disclaimer (1) scared me away. (But I’m happy it did!)
So, maybe my suggestion is not about you writing new or more explicit hints, but having some hint before the major disclaimer.
I’m sorry, I must be splitting hair here. Please ignore anything that sounds unnecessary to you. 
The invisiclues are fantastic anyway and they provide a great (and respectful) companion for this excellent game.
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Just finished this game, happily without any recourse to hints. I should note that it is possible to make even more of a difference than you have in your hints here, unless I missed a section somewhere.
The coffee machine smells rather a lot of herring, doesn’t it? Maybe a little too much. And there’s something else you can pick up that seems, well, weird, given the thousands you can’t.
So…
You can put the scrap of paper in the coffee machine, if you remove the carafe. Turn it on, set it aflame, and you can use it to set the papers on the table on fire. And watch it start to burn merrily as you vanish, and the guards break down the door. With any luck, your side can recreate the research from the notes before their side can from memory and scorched remains.
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Good point. I’ve added an “ending variations” section at the end.
IMO, the game is strongly hinting that you shouldn’t teleport out with the important papers, but should instead burn them, along with the useless ones, and then teleport out.
Intriguingly, the game always ends saying “You have made a difference” if you let the table fire burn long enough to burn the lab itself, even if you just WAIT around and don’t teleport out.
The code says:
! Endings: seven of them.
! jumped to the mat (captured)
! jumped to the mat, but burned the lab
! just leave (don't take papers)
! take papers
! burn papers
! burn lab, take papers
! burn lab and papers
! Of these, burning just the papers is almost the same as leaving them
! behind, because there are backups.
This makes me wonder whether you even really survive the teleportation. If there’s no “extra” difference between destroying the important papers and in teleporting out with them, maybe you and the papers don’t actually survive the trip…?
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The game does sort of hint in that direction, but…
…it’s pretty clear that if there exist backups — and of COURSE there are backups, plus you haven’t actually killed the scientists who created the thing — then you destroying the lab and papers would only be a temporary setback, and then you end up right back where you were before. The difference that you’ve made is that you’ve given your side more time to prepare, or, I guess, try again. But the chances of them coming up with an actual defense to something, when they don’t even know how it works, would be next to zero. And IMO the best outcome for this would be both sides coming up with something that counteracts the effect. An idea that doesn’t seem to have crossed the mind of your interrogator.
As for whether you survive… well, obviously it’s ambiguous. But it seems just ridiculously unlikely. If you take a sphere of basically any size smaller than say 100m centered on the apparatus, and postulate that you are equally likely to appear in all the places within it, the percentage of that space that wouldn’t be instantly fatal would be vanishingly small, even if the device actually works as expected: almost 50% underground, another 10 to 30% too long a fall depending on the building you’re in, and then what’re the chances that you appear in a wall, or a desk, or with a wire that some tech left stretched out between the wall and his terminal sticking through your chest? And as that radius gets larger, the numbers get worse. Fast.
Whenever I restore back to the Security Annex and go to the interrogation chamber and leave it doesn’t give me an option to say tango? Is there something I’m supposed to do before I leave or? Cause I got the pen then went to the interrogation chamber, then left. If I say yes when he asks me if I went there I’ll get killed
you cant tell him you went into the interrogation chamber; he’ll always kill you if you do. dont go there at all; instead go east to the security office.
(spoilers below!)
(in fact, you did go to the interrogation chamber – that is what actually happened. but you cant let the interrogator know.)
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