In The Alps Dada Killer Walkthrough

Navigating the Puzzle Design of a Surreal Alpine Escape

Most walkthroughs for niche puzzle games end up being either too vague or obsessively detailed about things nobody cares about. I spent about six hours last weekend working through In The Alps Dada Killer, and I ran into a wall at the third sequence that took another two hours to clear. Here is how the game actually works, where people get stuck, and what the developers expect you to figure out on your own. The core mechanic is environmental interaction combined with a journal system that records clues in a deliberately disorganized way. You are placed in a remote mountain village during the late 1970s, and the premise is that several residents have been found dead in circumstances that follow no logical pattern. Your job is to investigate crime scenes, collect physical evidence, and then use the Dadaist framework the game imposes on you to make connections that seem absurd until they suddenly do not. The game uses a color-coded evidence board. Red tags indicate witness statements, blue tags are physical objects, green tags are locations, and yellow tags are your own theories. You need to connect tags by dragging them together, but the connections only form when the items share a hidden thematic relationship. This is where most people fail. The game does not tell you what the thematic relationships are. It just gives you the board and expects you to intuit them.

Early on, I kept trying to connect evidence based on chronological proximity. That approach hits a hard wall around 45 minutes in. The game's internal logic operates on symbolic association, not timeline. A broken pocket watch found at one scene connects to a specific nursery rhyme mentioned in a different victim's journal. The link is the concept of interrupted time, not the fact that both appeared in Act Two. Once I stopped treating the evidence board like a standard detective tool and started treating it like a surrealist collage exercise, progress became much faster. The soundtrack is worth noting because it functions as a subtle hint system. The piano pieces that play during investigation sequences contain hidden melodic motifs that repeat across different chapters. When I first played through, I assumed the music was purely atmospheric. On my third run, I noticed the same three-note phrase appeared whenever you were near a clue that would become important later. It is a low-volume detail, and the game never confirms it, but tracking these musical echoes saved me at least an hour of backtracking.

The Journal System and Why It Confuses Players

Your in-game journal fills up with entries that are written in first person from the perspective of various villagers. The entries are intentionally contradictory. One person will claim they saw a figure in a red coat at midnight, and three pages later another resident writes that the entire village was asleep and nobody left their house that night. The game wants you to treat both accounts as equally valid and find the synthesis between them. I found that highlighting specific words within the journal entries rather than reading them straight through revealed patterns the developers buried there. Certain nouns and verbs are slightly dimmed in the text, which means less when you scroll past them quickly but becomes visible if you pause your cursor over the paragraph. These dimmed words tend to spell out acrostic-like messages when read vertically down the first column of each entry. It is a tedious method, and it only produces useful information in the second and fourth acts, but it is the intended path for the harder puzzles. There is also a pagination system in the journal that most people overlook. If you hold the interact button on a journal page, it flips through to show the previous and next entries in sequence, revealing marginalia that is not visible on the main page. The marginalia contains coordinates in a cipher format. I wasted about twenty minutes trying to solve a puzzle using only the main text before someone on Reddit pointed out the flipped pages. The coordinates there unlock a secret location near the alpine meadow area.

Common Mistakes That Cause Backtracking

The inventory management in this game is intentionally restrictive. You can carry four items at a time, and combining items requires a dedicated combine screen rather than a quick drag-and-drop. The four-slot limit is not a balancing choice, it is a narrative device. The game is forcing you to prioritize what you bring into each area, and making the wrong choice locks you out of solutions until you reload. A specific example from my own playthrough: I picked up the rusted key from the abandoned chapel before entering the valley sequence, assuming it would be useful there. It was not. The key is only needed for a storage locker near the starting village, and carrying it consumed a slot I could have used for the wool sweater, which is required to enter the frozen cave without taking damage over time. I had to reload to about the two-hour mark because I had already triggered a timer-based puzzle in the valley that I could not complete without the sweater. The game does not checkpoint between the chapel and the valley entrance, so the reload was necessary. Another mistake people make is assuming that every dialogue choice matters for the ending. Only two branching conversations out of the entire game affect the final outcome. The rest are flavor text, and choosing differently on them changes nothing about the puzzle solutions or the story beats. I spent extra time analyzing every NPC response on my first playthrough because I thought I was missing something. I was not.

Puzzles That Require a Shift in Perspective

The mountain cabin puzzle in the third act is the most difficult sequence in the game, and it is also the one where the Dadaist theme becomes most explicit. You are in a room with seven chairs arranged around a table. Each chair has an object placed on it, and the objects do not match the size of the chair in any conventional way. A tiny teacup sits on the largest chair. A heavy boot is on the smallest one. The solution requires you to rearrange the objects so that their absurdity follows a deliberate pattern rather than random placement. I originally tried connecting the objects by weight, then by material, then by the era they came from. None of those worked. The correct approach is to connect them by the emotion they evoke, which is counter-intuitive because the game never mentions emotion as a category. The hint is embedded in a child's drawing you find on the floor earlier in the same room. The drawing shows the chairs with faces, and the faces correspond to different emotional states. Matching the objects to the emotional states in the correct order opens the locked door. This is the kind of leap the game expects you to make, and there is no tutorial for it. The final act puzzle involving the Dada killer's identity relies on you having assembled the evidence board correctly throughout the entire game. If your connections are wrong, the puzzle becomes unsolvable in the final scene because the required thematic links will never form. This means that getting the evidence board right is not optional, even though the game gives you no feedback on whether your connections are correct until you reach the climax. I learned this the hard way on my second playthrough when I hit a dead end at the final confrontation and had to restart from the evidence board section.

Where to Get the Game

In The Alps Dada Killer is available on Steam and GOG. The Steam version includes cloud saves, which is worth having given the checkpoint issues I mentioned. The GOG version is DRM-free, which matters if you plan to preserve your saves across multiple playthroughs. Both versions are the same build. There is no extra content in either store, and no planned DLC that I am aware of. If you are looking for a fast download, the game is relatively small. The install size is around two gigabytes, and the patch history is minimal. I downloaded it directly from Steam without encountering any verification issues. The GOG client version worked fine as well, though the installation took slightly longer due to the lack of compression optimization in that package.

What the Game Does Not Handle Well

The camera angles during the investigative sequences can be problematic in narrow corridors. There are moments when the field of view cuts off part of the evidence board, making it impossible to see all your current connections at once. You can rotate the camera, but the rotation is limited and sometimes gets stuck against geometry. This is a minor inconvenience but it is real. I had to adjust my monitor distance to see the full board during the chapel sequence because the default camera position obscured the yellow theory tags. There is also no difficulty selector. The game assumes you will play it at the intended pace, which means the later puzzles can feel unfair if you missed the earlier hints. This is by design, but it is worth knowing upfront. If you are the type of player who likes to backtrack and re-examine evidence, the game's checkpoint system will work against you more than it helps. Sound cues are inconsistent. Some puzzles rely heavily on audio cues that are easy to miss if you are not wearing headphones at a moderate volume. Others rely on visual cues that are equally easy to miss if you are not pausing to examine every surface in a room. The game does not balance these systems evenly, and the inconsistency means you may need multiple passes through certain sections to catch everything.