What is your earliest memory?
Mine has to be the hours and hours I spent sitting in front of my cousin’s old TV, playing Super Mario 64 on his old Nintendo 64.
He was kind.
Gentle.
In a world that was too big and too loud for me, my cousin showed me kindness by letting me play on his most precious possession.
I was a timid child, too small for my own good, too shy to ever speak up.
Born as the only girl on my side of the family, I was always an outsider in the group of boys that made up the large group of cousins, but it was okay.
My favourite cousin and my older brothers looked out for me.
So I grew up, loving video games because they always reminded me of those blissful hours in which the world around me became so silent, so small compared to the cosmos that unfolded before me on the small TV screen.
What happened to change everything?
I assume you could say that life happened.
We grew up.
My cousin was older than me, it was time for him to live his own life. I was alone again.
No more time spent in front of his old console, on that old rug that smelled like dust and comfort.
Maybe it was pity, maybe it was kindness.
My brother gifted me his old PlayStation2 and one of these massive old TVs. The ones that looked like squares.
It could even play VHS tapes.
Should I have stuck with the old copies of Disney movies my mother had kept for us all those years?
There is something almost ironic about a child that was chronically afraid of the world around her and even more afraid of the dark, asking - no - begging her parents for a copy of Silent Hill.
The movie and the games.
Something about the nightmarish otherworld drew me in ever since I first read about it in an old and used copy of a video game magazine.
I would never forget the angry, piercing eyes of Eileen’s head just staring down Henry who looked so small compared to the angry abomination.
It was not exactly the same as the other games that drew me in with their almost Christian ideas.
The idea of eternal punishment.
Punishment for what?
The minds of children will forever be a strange place to me and mine would always be the biggest enigma.
Maybe it was comforting to think that there was something bigger, scarier than all those thoughts that were haunting me during the day and even more so during the night. Suddenly I had a weapon that could shoot and kill the vampires that forced me under the covers of my childhood bed countless nights.
Thinking back now, I would laugh, if it weren’t for the vivid memory of paralysing fear, the thick scent of stale air I kept breathing in and out under the blanket, certain of death.
Nobody could ever explain to me why I was so haunted all my life.
I had a good childhood, albeit my family being poor.
So everything I had was precious to me, just like the old gaming console.
I am pretty sure I could have broken my copies of the Silent Hill games if it weren’t for the sudden loss in interest in video games when the world opened itself up to me.
Suddenly I found friends, it felt like I belonged somewhere.
But old habits die hard and so did the draw to the morbid.
And there I found myself.
It started in the summer of last year, during the summer break of University there was not much I could or wanted to do in the burning heat of the warmest season in New England.
Lounging around on my large bed in my small flat - I did not want to stay in a dorm at university, so I worked as many odd jobs as I could to afford both university and this small kingdom I called my own - and I watched a let’s play on Youtube.
I used to watch them a lot when I was younger, remembering the release of Alan Wake and my instant peak in curiosity was met with the bitter reality of my family being too poor to afford a new gaming system, let alone to buy me a copy of the game.
In my young mind, it was the end of the world, until I discovered the kind stranger that uploaded his let’s play of the game on YouTube.
It felt like an entirely new world was opened up to me through the kindness of a person I would never meet.
For days, I could not think of anything but him releasing a new video, commenting excitedly under every new part, discussing my theories with other fans.
Soon, the kind stranger became something akin to a friend to me.
He reminded me of my cousin.
Throughout the years, I became a firm part of his online community.
Thanks to him, my interest in video games was sparked once more.
This passion for video games and literature somehow landed me a permanent seat in the cool, wooden chairs of my university.
I hardly had time to watch his new let’s plays in between my working hours, classes and time spent studying or researching.
So during my summer break, I wanted to make good on the promise I had given my old friend years ago; the promise that I would always support him and stay with him through all his journeys through these fictional lands.
But I was picky.
Not just any of his videos would do, not when my mind was pulled into every direction and my ability to focus had been chipped and gnawed through by hours and hours of class presentations and introductions to different genres of literature.
“Hm… looks good,” I remember mumbling to myself as I found the thumbnail of what looked like an Eastern European indie horror game.
There had been a wave of games like that, produced by Polish, Serbian and Russian developers in their own homes instead of big studios.
There had been a certain aesthetic so deeply inspired by their country’s rich folklore, the scars that the USSR had left on the psyche, economy and wellbeing of the countries it had enveloped.
I am not a religious person.
But there was a certain draw to the way that Russian artists drew iconographic masterpieces of Saints I would never dare naming as they were perfect strangers to me.
Still, I was beyond captivated by the beauty of their anguish, the horror of their martyrdom, the pain that simply existing seemed to etch so deep into their emaciated features.
Of course, not all of the artworks looked like that - but you should know me by now.
I could never find beauty or comfort in the same things that you might consider beautiful.
The strange yearning for the macabre was etched just as deep into my bones as the martyr’s eternal suffering for their faith was etched into theirs.
If you would ask me now what the game’s name was, I could not tell you.
No matter how hard I tried to recall it, it felt like a dream you just woke up from one that you so desperately tried to cling onto but couldn’t.
Why was the name the one thing that alluded me when I perfectly remember every other detail?
I wish I could tell you.
The premise was simple.
The world had ended.
There were only a few humans left.
In an unnamed city, a young girl and her companion robot fight for their survival on the daily.
The city is covered in a thick layer of ice, snow and grime.
Brutalist buildings reach far into the sky, sometimes you come across something that looks like a cottage, perfectly out of place in the real world, but somehow just right in this imaginary one.
I hear my friend’s voice echo through the speakers of my phone, he muses about the artstyle, the beautiful hand drawn backgrounds.
It has amazing details considering that it was developed by a small team of indie game developers.
What kind of story are they trying to tell? I can’t tell from the first few minutes of the game.
There is no definite explanation as to why the world had ended.
Why it had taken this new form that I could not make any sense of yet.
My professors loved praising me for my eye for detail, but some warned me that my urge to understand everything so deeply, consumed too much of my energy, too many of my thoughts.
There was no grandiose warning about it one day consuming my life, but I wish there would have been.
Maybe it would have saved me from this fate.
I watched him navigate the small blonde girl through the ruins of the city, wading through ruins and trash, I watched her mumble about her hunger.
A quick glance on my bedside table left me with the choice between a lukewarm diet coke and some stale cookies or hours and hours of labour in the kitchen.
The cookies weren’t half as bad, my eyes were still fixed on the small screen on my phone, all I cared about was getting something into my belly.
“I found something to eat!”
There was a moment of relief in my friend’s voice, the chat cheering him on.
Until we understood what those words meant.
In the garbage of the city, there had been packages of food that looked perfectly edible.
Bottles of soda, packaged cookies and canned foods.
If the world ended, even the pickiest eater had to make peace with eating things they normally wouldn’t, right?
But my mouth fell open when I watched the protagonist lick on a corpse’s skin, her little teeth hardly able to break it, so she just licked the same spot until it broke.
Her small mouth feasting on the corpse of a grown man like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Cannibalism is not the most shocking thing to a horror fan.
No.
What made skin crawl was the fact that I could feel her lick the skin as if it was my own mouth that latched onto the man’s body.
I felt my teeth close around the loose layer of skin, it never tasted like anything but I felt myself eat the man.
His headless corpse staring down on me.
Stale diet coke definitely tasted better than my first attempt at consuming human flesh.
No, no it must have been the awful heat.
I laid back down, the stream continued as normal.
So the little girl was a cannibal.
At least one part of her story opened up to me now.
Apparently I had missed a few sections of game play, because suddenly my friend was running, he ran away from a man in a hazmat suit.
The companion robot was broken for some reason, left behind.
A dog happily wagged its tail at the man in the starkly yellow plastic suit.
For a moment, a feeling of frenzied anxiety seemed to take over the chat as they begged and pleaded for the dog to run away.
But it happily wagged its tail, even when the man held up two different ribbons.
He tied one around the robot, whatever that meant it couldn’t be good, and the second one around the dog.
For a few moments stunned silence kept us all on the edge of our seats, what were we anticipating?
That the dog would die?
Did he mark it like the robot?
But they wore two different ribbons.
The man simply walked away, the dog following him.
Slowly, my friend exhaled.
“Well, at least the puppy is safe -“
His joy was cut short when she appeared on screen.
To this day, I can’t tell you the entity’s name.
She looked strange, completely out of place in this apocalyptic landscape.
A tall, hulking figure of a woman.
She slowly walked towards the little girl, her back hunched, her pale white skin hanging loosely on her body that was draped into a black mourning shroud.
Her face looked mask-like, her lips always slightly parted, her black hair tied into a neat bun, but the space in which her eyes should have been were nothing but black holes.
“Fuck - fuck, if she gets me it’s game over.”
So he began running.
But she always caught up with him, it was a simple game over.
I found myself sitting up straight, why the hell was he always running in the same direction? He knew the outcome already.
Especially when there was a clearly marked door in safe distance to the woman, he just needed to open it.
Of course he was a better gamer than I could ever be, but I found myself typing an irritated comment, maybe I was being mean - but I could regret that later.
Frustrated, I tossed my phone to the side and stared at the ceiling.
If I had spare cash to afford more than a shitty laptop that could hardly run Stardew Valley on a good day, I would play the game myself.
Open the door and get to safety.
But life just did not work like that.
So I closed my eyes and tried to sleep off my strange irritation.
Strangely, sleep came easy.
I’m not good with sleep, but I felt a sense of relief when I drifted off so easily I didn’t even realise I was asleep.
Maybe that’s why the dream felt so real.
I was in that unnamed city, looking around, the pixel graphics were non-existent.
This was my new reality and I knew what to do.
Look for clues that reveal the truth to me.
About who I am, why I am here, what happened to this town I call home.
Much of the first minutes played out like my friend’s gameplay footage, only that I did not perceive it as a game or a memory I retained from someone else walking this path in a body that is not my own.
Instead, I found a severed arm, but I left it be.
I had already eaten, I had other things to do.
The man in the yellow hazmat suit never came to stalk me either.
How strange.
But I was free to roam, a sense of hot curiosity began burning away every rational thought I might have had.
I rushed down the alleyway I fantasised about running down so many times before, only to find that the door was locked, it was blocked by trash, this perfectly pristine garbage.
A memory began to fill my mind as I climbed up on the trash to reach the roof of the building, granting me access to a window and hopefully the inside of this building.
A safety I was seeking for no reason at all.
Nobody was chasing me in this dream world.
In this fantasy someone else had created based on the pain of generations of people before me.
Pain of people that were so far removed from me.
As I climbed, I could hear a woman’s voice, I felt her embrace me.
My aunt loved other women, she raised me like her own, she was one of the best people I had ever known.
But what had happened to her?
I needed to dig deeper to find out.
Almost a little too effortlessly, I reached the roof, the window was slightly ajar, but as expected, trash blocked the entry to the house.
It was a swift movement.
I just needed to pull on one piece to make it spill.
Images flooded my mind, other parts of the city suddenly freed up or blocked off by the garbage I moved but I didn’t care.
I needed to get into this building and I don’t even know why.
Faintly, the sound of Christmas carols reached my ears.
How strange.
They still celebrated Christmas even in a place like this?
Not that it mattered.
I pushed the window open and forced my way inside the house, I jumped and landed in the living room of the building.
It must have been left in its current state since the 80s.
Looking around, I found a surprisingly small pile of trash, but also a TV set mounted into one of these big shelves that are built into the wall.
The old TV turned on on its own.
Strange footage poured off the screen and into my mind, nobody was speaking but in my mind everything began to make sense.
The soldiers. My aunt. It felt like I just needed to watch the footage a little longer for it to make sense, for me to find out the truth that I had been yearning for as if this was truly who I was.
As if this was my life and not the quiet time at university in New England.
But then it started.
Should I have willed myself to wake up?
I don’t know.
I don’t know if I could have and I don’t know what would have happened if I had never woken up.
To the right side of the TV set was a door, it began rattling but I couldn’t bring myself to look away from the screen.
I needed to know more.
I needed to know everything.
But before the truth was revealed to me, the truth that I needed more than rationality that was clinging to my survival instincts, the door flew open.
The stalking figure of the old woman floated into the room.
I had convinced myself it would be the man in the yellow hazmat suit, I could deal with him.
But it was that old woman.
Her mouth suddenly forming a wide grin, something I had never seen her do before, she began to speak and it felt as if the words were directly drilling into my ears, my brain.
“You opened the door, didn’t you? You opened the door, you wanted this. You opened the door.”
It didn’t feel like she was talking to the player character in a game, she was talking to me.
Cold fear gripped me, suddenly my survival instincts decided to get the better of me and I started running.
But her words had burrowed into my ears, into my flesh, into my bones.
“You wanted this. You opened the door.”
I wanted to scream but it felt like I had lost the ability to make any sound, the city was unforgiving but it began to fade around me.
A fade to black.
It should have been a good sign, right?
But the strange thing was, that even though I was aware that I was dreaming, that this couldn’t be real, I could watch and feel myself close a door that doesn’t exist.
Has anyone ever told you to try and imagine an apple in your mind?
I am not someone who can imagine a perfectly pristine apple, it is more vague than that, it is a faint idea.
So was the door that I violently shut while the woman’s voice rang in my head like a chant, a taunt, “You opened the door, you opened the door, you opened the door.”
It was an accusation, it was the truth, it was -
I woke up startled at the sound of my phone ringing.
When I answered the call, a wave of relief washed over me when I heard my mother’s voice.
“I just wanted to remind you that you have an appointment in the morning.”
God bless this woman.
Unlike me, she believes in things like fate, God and demons. Evil spirits.
I think she warded off something horrible because the longer the woman taunted me, the less afraid I felt and the angrier I got.
White hot rage nearly made me rip open the door I was so desperate to close to fight back against whatever entity was mocking me.
That should have been the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
I never checked the comments on my friend’s YouTube video.
There was no reason for me to further engage with the game.
Curiosity almost got the better of me, I would not let it happen again.
Yes, I know it must sound strange, especially after I said I don’t believe in evil spirits that are out to get me, but the dream left me shaken.
Months passed by without any big events, no big revelations.
All of my attention was focused where it should have always gone to - my family, my real life friends, university and work.
Until one day I found myself taking a different footpath back from work to my little flat.
It was snowing.
The first snow that year.
I wanted to enjoy it, I hate summer heat but I love the winter.
The way even a thin layer of snow completely changes the world around me.
It was only now that I realised how eerily similar this path looked to that in the video game.
Of course without the dead body parts and piles of garbage but the buildings, the way that the streets are worn by years of use.
It was identical.
Even the door that I could not open when I first tried.
It was the same building, beckoning me.
Suddenly, it felt like my life in New England wasn’t my own.
The truth was calling to me.
I opened the door.