Photomaly Walkthrough

The loop you repeat all week

Every day is the same sequence with heavier interruptions layered on top. Learn it once on the beginner guide and the rest of this page becomes a schedule rather than a tutorial.

Day 1: chores, then your first orders

You wake up in the dark with the power out. Kill the alarm, take the flashlight and reset the fuse box out in the back alley, then lock that back door behind you — you will be told to keep it locked again later, and it is worth the habit. Back inside, grab the broom and clear the stains off the floor, turn the lights on and flip the shop sign.

Everything after that is camera work. The game teaches the three rules you will use for the rest of the run: stand on the marked spot in camera mode with the correct rotation and wait for the green icon before you shoot; interact with the shop computer while holding the camera to transfer the shots; hold an envelope and interact with the finished prints to bag an order. Your first customer wants a landscape photo at a specific size and count, and completing that order start to finish is what unlocks the opening achievement.

• Do01Reset the fuse box in the back alley, then lock the back door
• Do02Sweep the stains and turn the shop lights on
• Do03Open the shop sign before you wait for a customer
• Do04Read format, print size and print count off the slip before you pick up the camera
• Do05Keep Paper, Ink and Envelopes stocked from the store app on the computer

Day 1 customers and the first thing that is wrong

The opening roster is ordinary business: someone who wants to look handsome, a passport applicant, a man from a missing-person poster who wants a better photograph than the one on it, a musician posing for an album cover, a job applicant, and a schoolgirl whose friends claim she does not show up in photographs. She is the first hint the game is not going to stay a shop sim.

The one to be careful with is the customer who misses his wife and wants a photo to give her if they ever reunite. There is a second person in that print. Say so out loud and you can lose the sale on the spot — the request-by-request breakdown is on the customers page.

Day 2: the key, the roll and the room your father kept shut

The bald man with the censored face arrives before your first customer. He tells you not to ask questions, that he knows what you saw last night, that the previous owner — your father — worked with them, and that it is your turn now. He hands over a key and a film roll, says he will be back to collect the printed results, and warns you not to mention him to anyone.

The key opens the back room your father never let you into as a child, and it is the darkroom. The game walks you through it once: work the cutting station until the roll is used up to get negatives, run them through developer, stop bath and fixer in that order, hang them on the drying rack, then collect them dry and put them in an envelope. Full timings live on film developing.

Do not mix the envelopes up

Day 2 is also when you first juggle two film jobs at once — his roll plus a customer's — and the drying rack does not label anything. Bag his prints first and keep them somewhere separate. The customer rolls that week include a new year planner, a journalist's photographs that must be developed without anyone else seeing them, and a roll found in a grandparent's keepsake box, and none of them are as harmless as the requests sound.

Sleep at the end of the day and the first nightmare runs: you wake in the dark with no flashlight and no light switches, and something is on the other side of the peephole. There is nothing to solve — get through it and the next morning changes the job description.

Day 3: the shop cameras go in

Special cameras are installed around the shop and appear as software on your counter computer, with feeds for the lobby, your bedroom, the bathroom, the back room, the alley and the bins — some of them on night vision. The instruction is exact: check them from your computer during the shift, and if you spot something abnormal, go there, photograph it, transfer it to the PC and report it. Accepted evidence is acknowledged in plain language; a photograph of something ordinary is refused just as plainly.

Anomalies mostly spawn around customer activity, so sweep the feeds after each arrival and again when a customer walks into the photo room. Day 3 sightings include a figure under your bed and a person on the lobby couch who is not there when you walk in. The full workflow and the sighting log are on anomalies.

The back rooms and the ladder pieces

Late on day 3 the building takes you somewhere else: a beige maze of corridors with your studio mannequin loose in it, wearing a "no photographs" sign. It is a three-part puzzle rather than a chase.

Day 4: the quota goes up

Morning brings praise, a new set of photographs to print like last time, and the line that changes your pacing: your daily quota has increased, so check the cameras often. From here you cannot clear a day by glancing at the feeds twice.

Day 4 is also the busiest for oddities that are not all supernatural. A haunted piñata turns up strung in a back room, a clown appears in the bathroom, something moves in the bins, and a hand comes out of the vent. Meanwhile a customer who claims to have worked with your father hands you a USB that hacks the shop computer, and an actual stranger walks in and uses your bathroom. The officer who stops by tells you he will be on the corner all night and that you can step out and call him — and when someone tries the back door later, shouting for help genuinely brings him. Lock the door afterwards.

The vent, and what you are allowed to remember

The night after day 4 is the run's biggest story beat. The nightmare hands you a screwdriver, you unscrew the vent cover and crawl through, and what is on the other side is a memory rather than a monster. It reframes the whole week: the reason your father's photograph behind the counter has been getting sharper day by day is that your character is recovering something that was taken from him.

From here the run has one job left, and it is the one you have been graded on all along.

Day 5: the day that is graded

Your contact collects the last film roll, tells you that you are even better at this than your father, and then says it plainly: today is your last chance to fill your anomaly quota, and if you succeed you will be rewarded. A documented clear of this day needed four reports.

Play it deliberately. Sweep after every customer, take insurance photographs of anything that looks wrong even while an order is live, and report from the computer the moment the shot is on it. Day 5 sightings on record include a cat that is not a cat, something on your bed, a shape out by the free-candy van and a clown in the vents. If the counter is one short as the last customer leaves, re-walk the rooms you photographed least — the bathroom, the alley and your own bedroom are the usual culprits.

• Do01Check the feeds before you even open the shop
• Do02Sweep again on every arrival and every trip into the photo room
• Do03Shoot first, report second — never leave a sighting unphotographed
• Do04Watch the counter on the computer rather than counting in your head
• Do05Do not send padding; refused reports do not move the target
• Do06Clear the quota before you close the shop for the night

Day 6: the payoff

There is no shift on the final morning. Your contact walks in, and which speech he gives depends entirely on the previous day's counter — either he is glad you did not betray his trust and pays out the reward he promised, or he tells you he expected better and the studio resets around you. Both conclusions and their exact conditions are broken down on the endings page.

Whichever you get, the credits run over the photographs you actually took, which is a quietly good reason to keep the shots you liked instead of deleting the whole album every evening.