I am really into video games, especially horror survival games. I have been playing a ton of Demonologist, which while I highly recommend, is not why I’ve chosen to write to you today. A game, which has been taken off of the Steam store shortly after I bought it, simply titled The Following, was a seemingly simplistic game. You create an avatar, which was cool because you can upload a copy of yourself that AI fills out to make them look like you, and your objective is to navigate through the house, collecting things that will allow you to escape while avoiding this thing that is following you. Seems simple enough, plenty of jump scares, avatar that looks like me, what’s not to like? Or at least that’s what I thought until I loaded up the first level.
The first level was my childhood home.
Now, before I hear you all playing devils advocate, it wasn’t just the layout of my childhood home. It was a perfect replica, down to the furniture, family portraits hanging on the wall, the crayon drawings from when I was three that my parents left in the hallway because they thought it was funny, the stains on the carpet from where I dropped my bowl of chili, all of it.
If this wasn’t strange enough, my avatar was me. Except it wasn’t me now, it was me as a seven year old. My avatar, wearing my favourite San Diego Chargers jersey, Jean shorts, a baseball cap, and some sneakers looked exactly as I did at that age, in fact, that was the outfit I wore on my birthday. Now, a normal person probably would have turned the game off and called the cops, but I am not a normal person. I decided to play.
From a gaming perspective, it felt like I was playing with cheat codes since I knew this house like the back of my hand. I effortlessly navigated throughout my childhood home, finding things that didn’t belong. The first was a photograph I did not recognize: It was me, holding a balloon at what appeared to be a circus, holding hands with an older woman whom I had never seen before. The next thing I grabbed was my sisters diary. While my sister did have a diary, hers had a green cover, not a red one. The last thing that seemed out of place to me was a copy of a newspaper with my photo on the cover: Local boy found five days after he went missing. I never went missing, so that definitely caught my eye.
I managed to make it back into the living room after collecting these things when the games music changed. The air began to rapidly cool, as evidenced by my avatars breathing. I could hear noises around me, and they sounded so real, as if someone was just behind me, Out of the corner of the screen, I saw the woman.
She was the same one from the photo, with some differences. Her arms seemed to be elongated, longer than any normal humans arms should be. Her smile expanded, continuously growing, as she turned and faced me. Slowly crawling towards the screen she said something that gave me chills
“{Redacted}, it’s been a long time my lovely. Oh how I have missed you.”
While I can forgive the layout of my childhood home and an avatar that looks exactly like me, never during character creation did it give me an opportunity to give my character a name, nor did I enter one. How did this video game know my name? I decided I would save and quit, and talk to someone to see if this was something I should legitimately be worried about.
My girlfriend was a lot less chill with this situation than I was.
“{Redacted} What the hell? Why didn’t you call the cops?” She sternly said to me while crossing her arms. When she was mad, she would cross her arms and rapidly tap her foot. She was doing both of these things so I knew I had messed up.
“Babe I honestly didn’t think it was that big of a deal, like a lot of this is coincidence.”
“One of those things could maybe be passed off as coincidence. But the fact that they used your name, your childhood photos, and your childhood home is not ok. Who designed this game anyway?”
“The publisher is a third party developer, some company called Tartarus.”
“Tartarus? Lets look them up real quick and see what their deal is.”
Things would only continue to spiral from there. We could not find a website for Tartarus. We tried googling the game and nothing came up. In fact, after deep internet searches, we finally found a blog post on the internet in which the person, whose username was TerribleOgre23, stated something similar happening to them. They stated that bad things continued to happen to them after playing the game, and it only stopped when they finished it.
So it looks like I have found myself in a Jumanji situation, yet the parting advice that TerribleOgre23 left did not inspire confidence:
Whatever you do, under no circumstances are you to get caught in the game. This has to be a perfect run if you wish to protect yourself or your loved ones from any harm. The longer you wait to play, the worse it is going to be for you.
My girlfriend told me that TerribleOgre23’s post was nothing more than some internet creepy pasta, and that I need to go to the police, but I don’t know what I should do. I decided to call my mom and fill her in on everything as well. when I told her, all she said was:
“Stop what you are doing and come home, we need to talk.”