Team Fortress 2 was my favorite multiplayer game, however recent events made it impossible for me to continue playing it.
I had taken a break from TF2 for a while, I guess it was almost a year ago when I last played it, though last week I decided to play it again. At the beginning I loaded tr_walkway_rc2, a practice map, there I shot couple of bots and I again felt that joy from the gameplay. I started searching for some servers which had plr_hightower played on them, it was my favorite map, so I didn’t think twice to type it in my server browser.
Strangely, there wasn’t many servers with players. Evening is supposed to be a peak time with high number of players. I glanced at the window: just dark forest, nothing new.
Later I found that server, it sounded ideal to me: it had 12 players, which is neither too much nor too little, plr_hightower and no plugins. Though, when I joined it was already 8 players on the server. I continued my usual game routine, playing as the soldier. I rocketjumped and killed snipers, and later got shot by them in revenge, nothing unusual. But there was this strange guy who was saying some gibberish in voice chat, something about the number four, though I considered his speech kind of funny. Nevertheless, even though this guy continued playing, I noticed that people were leaving, which made me a bit melancholic. My eyes were a bit tired so I went to kitchen and made a tea. When I came back, there were already only four people left on the server. The guy kept talking about the mysterious number four, I assumed that he was high or drunk and continued to play.
It wasn’t that fun anymore; map was emptier and I rarely saw both enemies and allies. My finger was on its way to press quit button when I noticed that I’m absolutely alone on the server. For some reason, the idea of wandering around the empty server became appealing to me. I jumped around the server looking for interesting spots to test my rocketjump skills on.
I felt really bad for some reason, thoughts were becoming more and more depressing. Now it not only was depressing but there was almost a feeling like this map took away my mood.
I decided to go to the bottom of the central tower. It was a small building with a medkit in it. I heard some noise and at first it felt like it was from the outside. Took off headphones. Silence.
It certainly was in the game. I came to the medkit and heard some gibberish. It was some whispering but I couldn’t find a source of these sounds. I looked for it and God… It was from beneath, from the place where nothing should be located. It sounded like a man but with high-pitched voice, though it was hard to distinguish because of quietness of the voice. I froze on the spot, thoughts disappeared from my mind and I couldn’t think of leaving the server.
“This can’t be real, there shouldn’t be anything in the textures”, I thought.
I shivered and rocketjumped to the higher medkit, the place where I couldn’t already clearly see what happened at the bottom.
Every couple of days I wake up from nightmares and each time I feel this awful dread, I feel scared, I’m scared each time because I’m afraid that I will hear that from the hall.
The creature started screeching. I stared at my monitor in terror. Panicking, I managed to rocketjump to the highest point of the tower. From that point I could only see the narrow corridor which led straight to my position. The thing started to whisper again; I heard slow footsteps like it was a player who made them.
By accident my finger fell on the ‘V’ button and voice chat turned on, I mumbled something out of inertia and… that creature answered me. New player icon in voice chat didn’t appear, but I still vividly remember how I heard it in the game. The thing growled in low-pitch voice, I distinguished words from growling and heard how it was calling me by name. I screamed in terror; I looked in the corridor and tried to see something, while counting each heartbeat, but I still couldn’t see anything in that hallway.
And then it screeched again, I immediately pressed ‘~’, opened console and typed ‘disconnect’. Main menu was as usual but I know that there was something sinister in it on that night which I didn’t notice at first glimpse.
I try to forget that at the moment before I disconnected, the moment when the console took up half of the screen, I saw something dark in the hallway, I couldn’t see the thing properly but its malformed silhouette was approaching me.
Each night I wake up from disgusting nightmare with malformed creatures and stare at the hallway in dread and terror.
I can’t play my favorite game anymore, every time when I see that someone leaves the server, I can’t withstand being on a server anymore and quit the game. I haven’t played hightower since the event, sometimes I see friends in my steamlist playing it, and each time it gives me shivers and awful memories returning back. Even though I try hard to not think about the event, at nights I always get those nasty thoughts… they’re about those malfored creatures living in the textures of maps.
Don’t play on empty servers.