Online: 404 Main Quest: Charlie's Objectives, the Police Station and the Factory

Online: 404 has a story you can follow or ignore. The opening newspaper (The Maine Republic, June 10, 2022) sets it up: exactly ten years earlier, in the summer of 2012, the authorities of Leminsgale County announced an evacuation after an accident at the SunnyBites gummy factory, and about 4 km² around the town of Sunny Lakes disappeared behind a guarded metal fence. The people left inside, former factory workers now called Locals, lost their minds. You get in through a tunnel under the fence, and it collapses behind you.

Demo note: the demo only covers the opening. This page follows the story as far as the demo goes.

Step 1: Get inside and answer Charlie

Your contact Charlie texts you right away (“You alright? I was nearby. Saw the passage collapse behind you.”). He sums up your situation: “You currently have three problems. Locals, survival, and getting out of here. The axe helps with the first two. I’ll help with the third.” The northern checkpoints are empty, the perimeter fence is electrified (“touch it and bang”), and calling 911 does nothing.

Your phone’s Reminders app tracks the current objective. The first one: “Find an axe in the motel and message Charlie.”

Phone home screen with the hint that story objectives are tracked in Reminders, and the first objective to find an axe in the motel — Frame from “I’ve NEVER Played a Survival Game Like This… Your PHONE Is Everything! | Online: 404 [EP 1]” by Mon EvenStar. Watch at 04:23

Charlie's messages explaining that the county is not abandoned and the Locals used to work at the factory — Frame from “ONLINE 404 - Full Gameplay Walkthrough Part 1 [FULL GAME] No Commentary” by Zish Gaming. Watch at 28:16

Step 2: Gear up at the motel

Head to St. Bunny’s Motel. Grab the shotgun from the car next to the starting tent on the way, then the axe, hammer and lockpicks at the motel. See item locations. Charlie also says: “If you find batteries, pick them up. You can use them to charge your phone.”

Step 3: Learn the basics on your phone

Charlie’s advice is explicit: “First, you need a place to live.” Then: “Search the internet for how to make a building tool, and get to work”, and “Search the internet for how to craft simple things, like a water collector.” To open the locked motel rooms you need lockpicking first. The exact searches are on the search terms page.

He also tells you where to build: the Locals “mostly hang around familiar structures”, so put your shelter out in the woods, like the cabin he built himself.

Step 4: The real goal: out through the factory

Charlie explains the plan:

“There are underground tunnels at the local factory leading outside.”
To find your way through them you need the factory’s fire plan, kept at the police station: “Bars on the windows, reinforced doors, all that.”
“When you’re out walking, look for police cars. Maybe you’ll find the station keys in one of them.”
Charlie wants something from the factory too: “there is also something at the local gummy factory that I need”, which he later calls evidence of a biolab and “experiments on unsuspecting people”. His daughter Chris was a process engineer there, and he never saw her again.

Charlie's messages about the police station, the station keys in police cars and building a shelter first — Frame from “I’ve NEVER Played a Survival Game Like This… Your PHONE Is Everything! | Online: 404 [EP 1]” by Mon EvenStar. Watch at 33:00

“But if I were you, I’d build a shelter first. Night will be hard without one.” The demo ends before the police station; we’ll continue this walkthrough at launch.

Side request: Grandma’s cigarettes

A voice upstairs at the motel, “Grandma”, shouts at you (“Is that you, you brainless freaks? Drop dead, all of you!”) and asks for cigarettes. Deliveries go into the Grandma’s Box in the corridor. We haven’t seen the reward yet.

Cardboard box in the motel corridor labelled Grandma's Box — Frame from “I’ve NEVER Played a Survival Game Like This… Your PHONE Is Everything! | Online: 404 [EP 1]” by Mon EvenStar. Watch at 40:30

Kevin’s note

In the motel’s upstairs room, next to a spirit board and candles, you find Kevin’s Note, dated 2011. Kevin is a member of a poetry society with “this dumb name, The Order of the Thirsty Poet” (“What are they, needing water? We’re surrounded by rivers! Damn, even our town is called Sunny LAKES, not Sunny DESERTS!”). He writes that there is a spirit board in the lost-and-found box at St. Bunny’s Motel, and that he’s renting a room tonight to try it out for “the best rhymed story in Society history”. He never finished the note. The room also holds the Strange Thing, “a strange glowing object” that “seems to be pulsing”.

Lore so far

Smugglers grew weed in the county (their raised beds are still there) and were killed by the Locals. Their camp by the river still has supplies.
Locals are the former factory workers. Their bodies show real names: Mary Nguyen, Kenneth Wilson, Dorothy Taylor, Scott Miller.
You can find discharged phones (at the motel and the smugglers’ camp). A power bank charges them, but no one in the demo found a way to read them yet.
The demo has no saving: the Sleep panel’s “Save Game” button is greyed out with the note “Saves will be available in the full version of the game. $0.99 per save. Just kidding.”