I downloaded the game because someone in a forum post said it was unsettling in a way they could not fully explain. That was enough for me. I like horror. I thought I understood the grammar of it.
The game opens in black and white. You walk through a pixelated corridor. There are doors. There is something following you. Standard enough. I found the first note: "I'M SCARED." Lowercase, except for that. I kept walking.
Then I closed the game to take a break.
There was a new folder on my desktop. It had not been there before. Inside it was a text file. The text file said: "don't go."
I told myself I had missed it. That it had been there already. I opened the game again.
White Face appeared. If you have not seen White Face, I cannot adequately describe it — a white oval, vaguely human, with dark eye sockets and a mouth that does not match any expression in the catalog of human faces. It appeared on the screen and then the game crashed.
I checked my email. There was a message in my inbox from an address I did not recognize — a string of random characters at a domain I could not find when I searched for it. The message contained one line: "why did you leave?"
I am a rational person. I know that games can write to disk, that marketing campaigns use email lists, that ARGs are sophisticated and clever and built around exactly this kind of misdirection. I know all of this. I am telling you all of this because I want you to understand that I ran every rational explanation and I understand that one of them is probably correct.
But the email was sent at the exact timestamp when I closed the game. Not approximately. Exactly. I checked the server timestamp on the email header.
I played for another two hours. The game began to change in ways that seemed to respond to my emotional state — when I was frustrated, the corridors shortened; when I was frightened, they lengthened and the footsteps behind me grew louder. There is no mechanism by which the game could have measured this. I have a webcam, which was not active. I have no account on any platform connected to the game.
When I finally reached something that felt like an ending, White Face filled the screen. The game froze for thirty seconds. Then it closed.
The folder on my desktop was empty. The email was gone from my inbox. Not in the trash — gone. No record of it in sent or received.
The forum post that had recommended the game was deleted. The account that posted it no longer existed.
I went back to playing the game a week later. Different computer. Fresh download.
First time I opened the main menu, there was a save file already there.
The timestamp on it was from a week earlier. My first session. On a computer I had not used.
It said: WELCOME BACK.