Several months ago something happened between me and my friend that I haven’t been able to talk about with anyone out of fear of sounding insane. However, after months of quietly suffering I can no longer keep my mouth shut. I need to get this off my chest, and I need to tell my story. All of it, for better or for worse. You see, this all started with a video game called “The Osiris Effect.”
Now, I’m a really big horror fan. I’m also really into video games. So, naturally my favorite type of games to play are horror related. Earlier this year, around the end of January, one of my life-long friends, Luke, messaged me about a video game that he wanted us to play together. He was familiar with my fascination with horror games and was a pretty big fan himself, and he said that this game had the potential of being one of the scariest games either of us have ever experienced.
According to Luke, the entire thing was designed and created by a guy named Ari Gremper, who was a student at the same college that Luke attended. This Ari guy was apparently some sort of coding wizard that invented the game as a sort of passion project for his senior thesis, and he wanted to know if Luke and I were interested in play testing an early version of the software.
I greedily accepted Luke’s offer and was then given the basics of how the game worked. The game’s setup was similar to that of an AI chat bot, and the main premise involved answering a bunch of questions that were being asked by an algorithm developed by Ari himself.
Luke described it as a text based, choose-your-own-adventure type of horror experience, and as the game progresses the questions get more and more catered to the things that scare you most. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the thing.
Based on how the game was played though, I was curious how long it would take to complete. Was there even an ending? Or did the questions just continue on forever?
Whenever I brought these questions up to Luke he told me that Ari assured him that there was an ending, and that we’d know it when we got there. The following Friday, Luke and I were both sent our own private links so that we could play it ourselves. Later that night, the two of us booted up the game for the very first time.
I was immediately greeted by a generic looking messaging board made up of a black background with white font. Written across the top of the page was “the osiris effect.ai,” and below that was a chat window. Several seconds went by before three dots appeared in the upper left corner. The three dots danced for a little bit and then a block of text popped up on screen.
Hello player, I am the creator of the horror game that you are about to experience. You can call me Osiris. Before we get started, there are a few things that you should know about The Osiris Effect. Firstly, the game is designed to be played alone. So, for the best results please continue on your own and try not to get distracted by anything happening around you. You will be asked a number of questions throughout the game. Try to answer them as honestly as you can no matter how random they may appear. The more honest you are, the more fun you will have. Occasionally, you will also be presented with a series of fictional scenarios. Your response to these scenarios should be kept short, but precise. Now, let’s begin.
After the explanation was over, I was presented with the first question.
Are you scared?
It wasn’t a very original question to ask. As a matter of fact, it was kind of a lame and predictable way to begin the game, but I gave Ari the benefit of the doubt.
I typed out “no” and then hit enter. Then the next question popped up.
How many hours of sleep did you get last night?
I typed in “between 7 and 8 hours” because I wasn’t sure of the exact number and hit enter.
What was the last thing you ate?
“A peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
How fast can you solve a Rubik’s Cube?
“Less than three minutes.”
This is how the questioning went on for a while. When I first heard that I was going to be answering questions in a choose-your-own-adventure type of horror game, I figured that the questions were going to be things like “what’s your biggest fear?” or “are you afraid of the dark?” But these questions just seemed like random, non sequiturs with no real purpose other than to…I don’t know, through me off? Make me feel uncomfortable? I hated to admit it, but given the context of the game, it was kind of working.
At first, the things that I was being asked about were all personality based questions. Like the type of things that someone would ask you on a first date.
What’s your favorite color?
Do you prefer winter, spring, summer, or fall?
What’s your Zodiac sign?
But as the questions continued, they began to border on the fence between odd and comedical.
How many mirrors are there in the building that you are in?
Is there a smell that you associate with being 13 years old?
How would you describe the taste of your own mouth?
And the more questions I answered, the stranger and stranger the prompts got. They got so weird in fact, that I had a hard time figuring out what to type because I legitimately didn’t know how to respond to them.
How many bones could be removed from your body before you noticed?
If you were a car, do you think that it would hurt to be driven around?
How many canaries do you think it would take to kill you?
Like, how could you even start to answer something like that? After about thirty minutes of answering a barrage of all sorts of bizarre questions, I was once again asked…
Are you scared?
I typed out “not yet,” and hit enter. I wasn’t lying either. The questions I was being asked were definitely weird, but they weren’t frightening me. Not yet, at least.
The three dots appeared again, as if the algorithm was thinking. After a few seconds, a much longer question appeared in the chat window. I realized that it was the first one of those “fictional scenarios” that Osiris told me about during his opening message at the beginning of the game. And if I thought that the questions were unhinged, then the scenarios that I was presented with were on a whole other level.
One day, you notice that a stray dog is following you around everywhere you go. However, the only time you ever see the dog is when it is peeking at you from around a corner. Whenever you try to chase the dog though, it disappears back behind the corner and you’re never able to find it. How do you plan on catching the dog?
Ari is definitely a creative man, I’ll give him that. I typed in something along the lines of: “put out food as a trap and try to catch it using a really long snare.”
After I hit enter, my phone lit up. I looked over to see that I had gotten a text from Luke.
Dude! This game is fucking wild haha
While reading the text, I noticed that I had gotten another text a few minutes earlier from someone that wasn’t in my contacts list. I didn’t recognize the area code of the unknown number, and the message they sent me was strange.
Stop this
That’s all it said. My first thought was that the text had something to do with the game. After thinking it over for a few seconds I came to the conclusion that Ari must have given the game my number in some way so that it could send me creepy messages while I played. It was just another level to the horror experience, I thought, and left it at that.
I looked back toward the screen that the game was on, only to find another scenario waiting for me.
You’re a child and it’s Christmas morning. After waking up you try to find your parents only to realize that your entire family is missing. You go downstairs and underneath the Christmas tree there are two presents. The first one is wrapped in black paper with a red ribbon, and it has a noticeable stench. The second one is a plain cardboard box with a milky, white liquid leaking from one of the corners. Which present do you open and why?
The scenarios carried on like this for a while. I won’t bore you by listing every single one, but trust me when I say that each one was just as weird and disturbing as the last. A few more that I can remember off the top of my head include…
One afternoon, while walking through the woods, you come across a dead deer. The deer has been viciously ripped open, and inside the wound you see a set of stairs leading down. It is too dark inside the deer to see where the stairs lead. What do you think is located at the bottom of the steps?
As well as this one…
You accidentally walk in on your girlfriend while she is using the bathroom. She is whispering something to herself while looking into the mirror. Whenever you walk in, her reflection looks toward you completely independently from the rest of her body. She seems to realize her mistake before returning to normal. Your girlfriend then turns toward you as if nothing happened. Do you trust her after this?
Inter cut between the scenarios were more questions, like the ones from the beginning of the game. But, as time went on the questions started getting more and more specific toward me and my past.
Why are you so afraid of wells?
I was terrified of wells because of an accident that took place whenever I was younger, so I typed out exactly what had happened to me back then: “I accidentally fell into a well when I was a child and spent over four hours trapped at the bottom until I was rescued.”
Who was the man in the red jacket?
When I was in middle school, I was almost abducted on my way home from football practice, but a middle aged man in a red jacket saved me from getting into a stranger’s car. I never got the man’s name and never saw him again after that, so I responded: “I don’t know.”
What is a question that you would ask your dead dad?
My father really was dead. I have no idea how the game knew that, but I answered honestly: “Are you still in pain?”
And if all that wasn’t weird enough, strange things were starting to happen to me in real life as well. I looked over at my closet at one point and noticed that it was cracked open a little bit, even though I was certain that I had closed it earlier. When I got up to shut it I became paranoid that there was someone hiding inside, crouched down behind my clothes. After closing it, I heard a coat hanger fall to the ground. I put a chair in front of the door just to be safe.
I started hearing noises coming from my ceiling not too long after that. It sounded as if someone was running back and forth on the floor above me. But I was in my second story bedroom, so the only thing above me was the roof.
My phone also seemed to be lighting up with a new text message every thirty seconds. Some of them were from Luke, but the majority of them were from more unknown numbers. Most of the messages seemed like warnings, but none of them made sense.
You’re on your own now
Keep the lights on
It’s getting colder
Silence is dangerous
The bed is too soft
After a while I just turned my phone off completely. When I did, I could have sworn that I heard my front door open up downstairs. A few seconds later there was the unmistakable sound of footsteps making their way up the stairs. I looked at my bedroom door and saw a shadow appear at the bottom of the frame. I looked back at my computer screen.
Are you scared now?
I slammed my laptop closed. I pushed my bed frame up against the door and then crouched down in the corner of the room with my knees held up to my chest. I stayed like that all night until I saw the morning sun shining through my window and felt safe enough to move again.
I cautiously began my return back to reality. I started with my phone. I turned it back on expecting hundreds of unread messages from numbers that I didn’t recognize. But the only notifications that I had were some texts from Luke and a missed phone call from my mom. I looked through my phone’s history, but couldn’t find any of the messages from last night. They must have gotten deleted somehow.
I moved toward my bedroom door next, and after pushing the heavy barricade out of the way I took a peek below the wooden frame. I no longer saw the shadow of someone standing on the other side. I began to wonder if someone was ever actually there to begin with. My closet was also completely empty and I couldn’t hear any more footsteps coming from the roof.
After confirming that I was no longer in any danger, I went to call Luke because he was the only other person in the world that could probably understand what the hell I had gone through. I noticed the unread messages that Luke had left for me throughout the night and decided to open them up before calling him…
Have you gotten to the scenarios part of the game yet? Wtf was Ari on when he made this?!?
Wait…this doesn’t make sense, what kind of questions is it asking you?
Dude how tf did the game know about my sister?!? That shit is not fucking cool
I swear to god someone keeps knocking on my bedroom window
I think I’m close to finishing the game, but my TV turned on a few minutes ago and I can’t turn it off. I don’t like what’s on the screen
I’m at the end. Ari was right, you’ll know it when you see it
That was the last thing Luke wrote. It was almost 3:00 in the morning when he sent me that text. We started the game at the same time around 8:00 at night, which means that he had been playing for over seven hours at that point. When I called him he didn’t answer.
The next few days that followed were rough. To make a long story short, Luke was missing. No one knew where he was, but as time went on people started suspecting the worst. A large amount of blood was found in Luke’s room on the day of his disappearance, but according to the police they couldn’t officially label the case as a homicide because none of the blood belonged to him. To this day, it still hasn’t been identified.
I tried logging back into the game so that I could show the police the weird chat bot, but whenever I clicked the link that Ari had sent me it only showed a 404 error. And speaking of Ari, the police were never able to find him. Since I had never met the man I couldn’t give them a physical description, but I gave them Ari’s name as soon as the case was opened. After some investigating, the police told me that there was nobody registered at Luke’s college with the name Ari Gremper. They suspected that the name was just an alias.
I ultimately don’t know what Ari’s goal was with “The Osiris Effect.” I’m not sure if what Luke and I experienced was intentional or just a glitch, but what happened, happened.
I am sure of one thing though, and that is the fact that my friend is still missing. And the man responsible for his disappearance is out there somewhere with one of the scariest games ever created.