We used to play together every Monday night. That is, before the- I’m sorry, it’s difficult for me to talk about what happened directly. It’s easier if I just start right from the beginning, I think. At least, it helped when they asked me to make a statement down at the station. Is that okay? All right, thank you.
Well, there were five of us originally. I-I don’t like to use their full names. It brings back too many… memories. Anyway, five of us. Me, G, J, Y and Z. We met on an old Club Penguin private server, can you believe that? We were all just suckers for nostalgia, I guess. No, you can’t access it any more, unfortunately, it was closed down not long after we met. Just think, a couple of weeks and none of this might never have happened- crazy how these things go, hey? I mean, we all connected pretty well- actually, most of us were coincidentally from the same country, so we had a bunch to bond over, and although G was on the other side of the world, his schedule matched ours pretty well. We ended up adding each other on Discord and hanging out every so often, just watching movies together, shooting the shit, you know, the usual online friend stuff.
I don’t remember whose idea it was to start a Stardew game, but it was pretty early into our friendship. Oh, you haven’t heard of it? Stardew Valley’s a game based around managing a farm and befriending NPCs, among other things. We had all played a bit before, so we decided to start up a little farm of our own and mess around a bit. Just a normal farm, no mods installed, nothing crazy. The first few weeks we would just jump on, play a few hours together each week setting up fields and harvesting crops, talking to characters in game and generally having fun. Eventually, we started setting up sprinklers and automating the farm, which left us more time to explore the world and go about redecorating the town- filling up all the buildings with grass, messing with the townspeople, you know, just normal video game stuff. It started getting to a point where it would take a couple of seconds to load into each area, and maybe like thirty seconds to a minute to save the file at the end of each day- at the time, it became a running joke to guess how long it would take for the game to save all the stupid stuff we’d done. It was a peaceful time, I suppose.
The weird stuff started happening after about a year of game time. At that point, we’d done most of what the game had to offer, but there was a certain charm in just wandering around and collecting things to fill up our resource cache. One morning during the second spring of the save file, we woke up to find a letter in our mailbox. Normally these letters would come from townspeople to issue quests or deliver rewards, but that letter struck us all as odd because none of us had ever seen it before.
Y was the first to voice it. “Have you guys ever seen this letter before?”
“I don’t think so?” I replied, a little confused.
“Yeah, me neither,” J agreed. “We didn’t install any mods, did we?”
Z chimed in. “I’m pretty sure this is a vanilla save file, no mods at all.”
We laughed nervously. “Maybe we unlocked some kind of quest,” G mused.
The letter was just one line: “Shhhhhhh.”
“I wonder who’s giving the quest,” Z murmured. “I don’t think I’ve come across this one before.”
I was just as confused. “Normally the letters are pretty straightforward. Maybe this got added in an update or something?”
“Maybe we should just go do our dailies and see if something pops up,” J suggested.
We all agreed. Perhaps there’d be an event that would bring up the letter, we assumed.
I headed south to the lake, to spend the day fishing as I usually would. As I entered the area, a cutscene began, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence- a few NPCs would wander the lake, and sometimes certain game states would trigger special events. Shane, one of the townspeople, came running up to my character, arms flailing. A dialogue box popped up, and the first thing I noticed was that his character portrait was… different. I’d never seen Shane in so much distress before. Bloodshot eyes wide in terror, pale as a ghost, jaw hanging loose in shock.
“You talked.” was the first line. “Why did you talk about it? You- you need to hide before they- oh god-” he choked, as both of our character sprites turned to face something off screen. My dialogue options popped up, and I froze as I looked them over. All three of them were exactly the same: ‘help me help me help me help me help me help me’. Horrified, I went to click out of the cutscene, but my cursor froze before I could hover over any of the options, and the ‘Not Responding’ message appeared on the game window.
I opened my mouth to say something, but G was first to speak. “Hey guys, did something happen to you too? Abigail’s saying some weird shit and I can’t click out of it.”
“Neither can I,” Y confirmed. We all chimed in to confirm that something odd was happening with the NPCs we’d encountered.
“Should we just reload the day?” J suggested. “Worth a shot, I guess.”
We all agreed, and logged out. Loading back in, things seemed to be back to normal. Shane seemed to be his usual sardonic self when I spoke to him again, and there was no mention of the strange cutscene I’d just seen only a minute before. The others reported the same. We ended the session for the evening only a few minutes later. I think they were all as shaken as I was, but there was no more mention of what we had seen when we said our goodnights.
We didn’t go back to Stardew for a few weeks, in the end. We made our excuses; work, family, school, but I think deep down we all knew why. Whenever the topic was broached, there was always this palpable tension, but there was this unspoken agreement not to mention what had happened. When we did return, it was with more than a little apprehension. There was some nervous laughter as we loaded back in, but to our relief, things were fairly normal, aside from the lengthy loading times caused by our bloated save file. Things continued. We finished the farm off, married ourselves to some of the NPCs, started grinding for the 100% completion achievement. Seasons passed without incident, and we started to relax again. It was hard not to pass off the strange cutscene as some strange kind of fever dream, especially as none of us were particularly keen to mention it. Slowly but surely, things started to go back to normal.
I guess when things changed, it wasn’t immediately obvious. I noticed things going missing from our resource chests- a stack of stone here, a bunch of slime there. It wasn’t odd for these things to disappear occasionally for our own personal projects, but not in the quantities I was seeing. I don’t know why I didn’t say anything. Did the others notice as well? Were they just as hesitant to call it out as I was? In any case, I gritted my teeth and said nothing. I didn’t want to upset the fragile peace we were maintaining. Then the NPCs started acting weird. J’s ingame wife, Penny, began leaving the farm during the day, which wasn’t strange in itself. But when she returned at night, she’d refuse to talk to any of us, making a beeline for the basement of their house, where she’d stand all night. What was even more bizarre was that we weren’t able to track where she went. It was like as soon as she left the boundaries of the farm, she completely disappeared off the face of the world. The other NPCs also started moving oddly, almost as if they were avoiding us. I’d have to almost chase them down and corner them to give their weekly friendship gifts. That being said, the friendship gifts didn’t seem to be working properly either. I could have sworn my friendship points were actually going down as I interacted with them, almost like they were scared to associate with me. The special calendar events stopped happening, too. The egg hunt, Stardew’s version of Easter, just didn’t occur. The NPCs didn’t even mention that it was happening. The flower dance? Nothing. Our weekly gaming sessions became noticeably more and more quiet as the eeriness of the game’s cadence set in, but still we danced around the topic.
It all came to a head a few months later. G and I were waiting for the others in a voice call for a nightly movie session, trying to make nervous conversation as we tended to do those days. Mid sentence, he cut me off.
“Was it all a dream?”
I stopped dead, frozen in place. “Was… what are you talking about?”
There was an audible quaver in his voice as he continued. “The mayor talked to me back then. H-he said I’d been chosen. Not to say a word. That if I behaved, maybe nothing would happen. But that it might come back and if it did, I wou-”
“Shut up. Just shut up. I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t want to hear it. Nothing happened.”
I don’t know why I said what I said. It just came out of my mouth, and I could hear the own panic in my voice. I heard an inhalation from G’s end, like he wanted to say something, but nothing came through. We both sat silent until the others arrived.
That day, I headed into town to purchase some seeds for the upcoming crop. As I walked into the general store, I noticed the owner, Pierre, out of his usual place behind the counter. To my surprise, he walked up to me, as if waiting to start a conversation. Almost unthinkingly, I clicked on him, and a cutscene started up. Immediately, Pierre’s portrait popped up, his face pale and sweat droplets clearly visible on his forehead. His whole portrait was shaking slightly, as if he was terrified. Text began unspooling on the screen, but it took me a few seconds to register what he was saying.
“H-he’s done something, hasn’t he? It’s getting closer. It can smell our fear. Please, my daughter… I don’t want her t-”
The screen briefly froze, flickered and then whited out. I jerked back in shock, but when the monitor reloaded itself, I was standing back at the store entrance, as if the last few seconds had never happened. The others had been quiet through it all, but as far as I could tell, none of them had noticed anything amiss. I opened my mouth to say something, but then stopped. What would I even say? I didn’t want to alienate my friends even further, or frighten them even more than they already were. How stupid of me, right? Now that I’m recounting it back, it seems pretty obvious that I should have spoken up. Maybe then we would have just quit then and there, just force closed that fucking game and forgotten about it. But I said nothing.
The same evening, we finished planting our new seeds and headed to bed. The screen faded to black as per usual, and there was a pause as the game saved itself. We were used to this; after all, we’d collected a lot of materials, and we’d assumed the save file was a little bloated. But the pause stretched on and on, one minute, two, three… Z interrupted the silence.
“Are you guys stuck in the save screen or is it just me?”
“Yeah, it’s never taken this long before. Did we mess something up today?” J asked. Again, I opened my mouth, but then hesitated. Whatever it was, it didn’t like that G had spoken up about it before. A coil of dread in my chest tightened as I thought about the possible consequences should I decide to explain what had happened earlier, when G suddenly broke the silence.
“I- I didn’t think the day had ended yet. It’s still early evening for me on my screen. You guys are still awake on here too.”
The black screen suddenly shifted, and I was seeing G’s character on screen outside his cabin, on the farm. He was clearly not alone- I watched my character and the others moving around the farm as well, carrying materials above their heads. There was stone, and wood, and other indeterminate objects I had never seen in the game before. Lumps of red and brown, sharp silver, tendrils of… something. This strange low hum began buzzing in my headset, and judging from the sudden exclamations of the others, they were hearing it too. Then, out of nowhere, G’s character began to move, walking south towards the paddocks. Our characters fell into formation around him, moving like puppets on strings. The voice chat erupted in panic.
“What the fuck is happening?”
“Where are they going?”
“Is this some sort of sick joke?”
We watched in horror as our procession of characters moved into the paddock, and into the farm’s barn. We’d upgraded it to house a full farm’s worth of animals, but those animals were nowhere to be seen… at first. As we entered, the first thing I noticed was the huge structure our characters had apparently assembled in the centre of the space. It was a twisted abomination of a shrine, or an altar, drenched in fluid and blood, draped in dripping ropes, covered in tattered red cloth. The shape of the altar almost hurt my eyes to look at, but what was even worse was what was being displayed on it. Several of the townspeople’s heads, eyes wide and mouths gaping in horror, were perched on the bloodstained stone, splattered in gore as if they’d been ripped apart. The farm animals came into view, their corpses strung up behind the altar in some horrific parody of a gallows. We went completely silent for a moment, shocked into stillness. G spoke then, in a frightened whisper.
“What are they doing to me?”
I looked down to our group of characters for the first time, watching in horror as I realized we had all taken a hold of G and were dragging him forward to the shrine. It was clear that he was trying to resist- there were drag marks being created by his shoes as he struggled, all the way up to the altar. I tried pressing keys, clicking away, even tried to close the window- none of it worked. It was like we were just spectators in this gruesome show, powerless to even look away as we watched our characters lay G out on the altar amongst the gore and take up positions standing around him. All the while, all I could hear was G constantly talking, growing more and more panicked.
“Guys? Please, what’s happening? Are you seeing this? God, no… please, someone say something, I don’t like this! Anyone?”
None of us spoke up. I don’t think we could have, even if we’d tried to. The buzzing began to rise as our characters moved closer to the altar, and now I could hear that it wasn’t buzzing anymore, it was whispering, and there was a low chuckle below it all, like something was waiting eagerly in anticipation for what would come next. The screen tinged with red as we moved in, and G began screaming, a raw animal scream that went on and on for what seemed like hours. Then there was this wet rip, and the screams turned into a high-pitched squeal as my monitor went completely red, as if it was so splattered with blood that I couldn’t see past it at all. Time stretched as we listened in silence to G’s shrieking and babbling for mercy, the sounds of flesh being torn apart, the drip of gore, and the ever-present whispering that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. I don’t know why none of us did anything. Or maybe the others tried? I don’t want to make excuses, but it was almost as if I’d entered a sort of trance, just a spectator playing audience to… whatever we were witnessing. Out of nowhere, there was a snap and a crunch, and G’s screaming died down to a low gurgling, and that too quickly fell silent. At some point, the whispering had stopped too. There was just that awful sound of chewing flesh. When I spoke, it was like it was coming out of someone else’s mouth, trembling and barely above a whisper.
“G? Are you there?”
My computer gave a little click, and the screen went black. It was like I’d been shaken out of a daze. I jumped into action, moving to switch the PC back on, eyes wide, gnawing on my lip feverishly, so hard that I could taste blood. G was gone from the voice call, and so were the others. I opened Stardew. The save file was still there, but my little avatar had changed. Around his mouth it was caked in red, and he had his finger up to his mouth, as if hushing me. I clicked to enter the file. All that popped up was a dialog box, right in the centre of the screen, before the game force closed.
“Shhhhhh.”
There was a news report the next night about a young man missing from his home, in the area we knew G was from. It was odd, the reporter said, because of the circumstances in which he’d gone missing. He had no reason to do so, and it looked as though he’d just vanished in thin air from his desk. There was a plate of food half-finished next to his PC, and he was still logged in, idling on the title screen of Stardew Valley. It was strange, though, the reporter said, because there was no save file there. It was like he’d logged on and not played a single minute of the game.
I had to give a police statement. I was G’s friend, after all. But I deliberately kept things to myself. They’d never believe me, would they? Some part of me doesn’t really believe what happened that night, myself. None of us have touched Stardew since that night. I haven’t spoken to any of them either. I don’t think any of us are ready to reach out again. There’s this sense of fear, deep down, that whatever we encountered in that cursed save file isn’t done with us yet, that if we try to piece together what came for us, it might come back to take another one of us. It could be me next time. You understand, don’t you? You understand why my statement at the station was so vague, right? If I’d drawn more attention to it…. I don’t even know what might happen now that I’ve told you. Please, forgive me… I didn’t think. I just needed to tell someone before I… before….
I-I need to tell you one more thing. Sometimes, I see G in my dreams, torn apart by our teeth and hands. Not in the game, but our actual hands, ripping him apart, wrapping my teeth around his throat, ripping out chunks of meat. The others around me, silently reaching for his arms, his legs, tearing open his stomach, feasting alongside me. I always wake up in a cold sweat from these dreams, shaking and dry-heaving with fear and revulsion. But the worst part isn’t the dreams. It’s after I sit up in bed, wiping away the taste of rank blood from my mouth. Lately, my hand comes away red. And last night? After the initial panic faded, I felt something heavy on the pillow beside my face. Something I’d coughed up half-asleep. It was a chunk of bloodstained flesh.