The Midnight Game is old. Older than the internet, older than the communities that passed it around. It was allegedly used by pagan priests to punish those who had angered the gods — to face the Midnight Man and survive was to have earned something. To not survive was the punishment.
The ritual:
At midnight exactly, write your name in blood on a piece of paper. Place a candle on top. Knock on your door 22 times. The final knock must fall exactly at midnight. Open the door. Blow out the candle. Close the door.
The Midnight Man is now in your home.
Relight the candle immediately. For the next three hours and thirty-three minutes, you must keep the candle lit and keep moving. If the candle goes out, you have twenty seconds to relight it before the Midnight Man reaches you. If you cannot relight it, create a circle of salt around yourself and stay inside it until 3:33 AM.
You will know the Midnight Man is close when the candle flickers without wind. When the temperature drops suddenly. When you begin to hear whispering.
Do not turn off any lights. Do not go to sleep. Do not taunt the Midnight Man. This last rule is repeated in every version of the ritual and seems the most self-evident, but it appears often enough to suggest that people need the reminder.
If the Midnight Man reaches you — if you fail to protect yourself — you will experience hallucinations specific to your worst fears. The hallucinations are reportedly perfect. Recipients cannot distinguish them from reality. These hallucinations will continue until 3:33 AM regardless of what you do.
At 3:33 AM, open the front door. The Midnight Man will leave.
What remains of those three hours and thirty-three minutes is yours to carry.
Several things are consistent across documented accounts: people play this ritual in groups. The candles go out more often than they should. People split up, which every account describes as a mistake in retrospect. And the hallucinations, when they come, are never described in detail by survivors. They say: you don't describe them. You don't give them more existence than they already have.
You just don't play alone.